Bamboo bites: Do cute chubby pandas hide a vicious side?

They do. Recent reports have emerged that a giant panda lost control and “ripped” a chunk out of a researcher at a wildlife conservation center in Sichuan Province, reminding the world that while they may look chubby and clumsy, the species is still a wild animal, with teeth and claws.

 

Wei Hua, a 41-year-old panda researcher at Tiantai Mountain Wild Rehabilitation Center, was completely caught off-guard by the attack when he was checking upon the condition of the female panda and its cub with colleagues on December 17.

“We didn’t know if it was going to play with us or ask for more food, when the panda ran up to me after it ate the bamboo we threw to it”, Wei told Chengdu Business Daily newspaper on Wednesday while still receiving medical attention at a hospital in Chengdu, the provincial capital.

 

But the animal’s movement towards him was a little “bigger than usual”, Wei recalled, thinking back to the day of the attack.

 

The female began to “flank” Wei by biting his left hand “so tightly that he could not break free”, and went on “tearing at him like crazy”.

 

“It only let me go about five or six minutes later, after being distracted by my colleagues who came to my aid”, Wei said.

Initial examinations showed that Wei suffered from dangerous blood loss and multiple fractures, on top of serious muscle injuries on his arms and legs.

 

Almost one-third of Wei’s left hand was “bitten off”.

 

The reason for the attack is still unclear. According to Wei, he was “fairly familiar with the attacking panda after staying with it for months before the incident”.

 

With a postgraduate degree in wild animal protection, Wei said he had been prepared for this kind of situation but the degree of the injury was still “beyond his imagination”. 

Asked how he might feel when encountering the panda again, Wei said he might have "mixed" feelings.

 

Wild giant pandas are found only in inland areas of China, and the species as recently been removed from the International Union for Conservation of Nature's endangered list. Despite having its status downgraded to "vulnerable," Chinese wild animal protection authorities have stressed that the threats facing the species are not gone.

 

The panda is a poster animal for China, becoming a cultural symbol of the country through images of the chubby, round and cute creatures chewing bamboo shoots, which frequently go viral on the Internet. Despite their cute image, many don't realize that giant pandas are in fact omnivorous, and, as can be confirmed by Wei, are potentially dangerous, wild animals. There have been several incidents in recent years of people getting into the enclosures of captive pandas and being attacked, while even 1970s French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing revealed in a 2013 interview that he was once "jumped on" by a panda at Vincennes Zoo in Paris.