What makes certain species and individual animals worth protecting? Christof examines the iconic case of the giant panda – a global symbol of conservation efforts and a national treasure of the People’s Republic of China – and suggests that kinship measurements play a central role in species conservation. Kinship is measured using a wide variety of methods, technologies and forms of data. Indicators of kinship range from genealogical proximity to behavioural resemblance and from lived closeness to genetic similarity. Although measurements of human kinship are widely used, for example in decisions about citizenship and inheritance, they are rarely studied under one theoretical heading. Therefore, their political and economic consequences have often been overlooked, including in environmentalism. Measured animal kinship has been mobilized to claim the belonging of highly valued species and for making breeding decisions that affect not only individual animals but also the human institutions that keep them. In Christof’s talk, you will hear about palaeobiological measurements of animal remains found in Europe that were used to challenge claims about the Chineseness of the giant panda lineage, a genetic matchmaking algorithm for captive pandas that was criticized as reviving a ‘backward’ cultural tradition of arranged marriages, and biologists’ measurements of kinship as embodied maternal care that promise to enhance the value of pseudo-pregnant female pandas for preserving the panda heritage. Christof Lammer is a social anthropologist based at the Department of Society, Knowledge and Politics at the University of Klagenfurt. As inherit fellow at Humboldt University of Berlin he pursued the project ‘Panda Heritage: Kinship Measurements and Life’s Value in Species Conservation’ (2024–2025). He is the author of Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China (2024, Berghahn) and has co-edited special issues on ‘Measuring Kinship: Gradual Belonging and Thresholds of Exclusion’ (2021, Social Analysis) and ‘Infrastructures of Value: New and Historical Materialities in Agriculture’ (2024, Ethnos) and is also a co-organizer of the DFG Scientific Network ‘Anthropology and China(s)’ (2021–2025).