The giant panda is the funniest animal on earth. It is a member of the order Carnivora. Its digestive tract is the standard carnivore kit: simple stomach, short intestine, a vestigial caecum, no proper fermentation chamber. Its genome contains all the enzymes for digesting meat. It lacks the enzyme genes for digesting cellulose, because it is not built to digest cellulose. It eats bamboo. Roughly twelve and a half kilos a day. For fourteen hours a day. Every day. It digests approximately seventeen percent of what it eats. Eight percent of the cellulose. The other eighty-odd percent passes straight through, undigested, out the other end. The bamboo is going through the panda almost as fast as the panda can shove it in. The panda spends most of its waking life eating, and most of its remaining waking life too exhausted by the inefficient digestion to do much of anything else. It sleeps a lot. It struggles to reproduce. It barely makes it. It survives by a margin so thin that for thirty years the species was officially classified as endangered. It was only downgraded to "vulnerable" in 2016, and only because the Chinese government spent decades running an enormous captive breeding programme, establishing dozens of protected reserves, and physically intervening in the species' reproduction because the natural one was not quite cutting it. The panda is what happens when a carnivore decides, evolutionarily speaking, that bamboo is a good idea. The panda is the case study for what veganism does to carnivore anatomy. The vegan, looking at the panda, sees a peaceful plant-eating bear and feels validated. The biologist, looking at the panda, sees a slowly-failing carnivore that exists today only because an entire civilisation chose to step in and prop it up. You are not a panda. You don't have a billion-pound conservation budget supplementing your B12. If you adopt the panda strategy without the panda's plot armour, the result is the panda outcome without the panda finale. Look at what we had to do to keep the panda going. Now ask yourself if that's the model you'd like to apply to your own biology.