Category Demo

The Giant Panda lives in mountainous regions, such as Sichuan and Tibet. The Giant Panda is the symbol of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), a conservation organization. Since the latter half of the 20th century, the panda has become an informal national emblem for China, and its image is found on many Chinese gold coins.

Despite being taxonomically a carnivore, their diet is overwhelmingly herbivorous. The Giant Panda eats shoots and leaves, living almost entirely on bamboo. Pandas are also known to eat eggs, the occasional fish, and some insects along with their bamboo diet. These are necessary sources of protein.

For many decades the precise taxonomic classification of the panda was under debate as both the Giant Panda and the distantly related Red Panda share characteristics of both bears and raccoons. However, genetic testing has revealed that Giant Pandas are true bears and part of the Ursidae family. Its closest bear relative is the Spectacled Bear of South America. (Disagreement remains about whether or not the Red Panda belongs in Ursidae; the raccoon family, Procyonidae; or in its own family, Ailuridae.)

Giant Pandas are an endangered species, threatened by continued habitat loss and by a very low birthrate, both in the wild and in captivity. About 1,600 are believed to survive in the wild. Poaching is uncommon; killing a panda was punishable in China by death until a 1997 law changed the penalty to 20 years imprisonment.

The Giant Panda has an unusual paw, with a "thumb" and five fingers; the "thumb" is actually a modified sesamoid bone. Stephen Jay Gould wrote an essay about this, then used the title The Panda's Thumb for a book of collected essays. The Giant Panda has a short tail, approximately 15 cm long.

The Giant Panda was first made known to the West in 1869 by the French missionary Armand David, who received a skin from a hunter on 11 March 1869. The first westerner known to have seen a living Giant Panda is the German zoologist Hugo Weigold, who purchased a cub in 1916. Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. became the first foreigners to shoot a panda on an expedition funded by the Field Museum of Natural History in the 1920s. In 1936, Ruth Harkness became the first Westerner to bring back a live Giant Panda, a cub named Su-Lin who went to live at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.

The Giant Panda has long been a favourite of the public, at least partly on account of the fact that the species has an appealing baby-like cuteness that makes it seem to resemble a living teddy bear. The fact that it is usually depicted reclining peacefully eating bamboo, as opposed to hunting, also adds to its image of innocence. Though the Giant Panda is often assumed docile because of their cuteness, they have been known to attack humans, usually assumed to be out of irritation rather than predatory behavior.

Loans of Giant Pandas to American and Japanese zoos formed an important part of the diplomacy of the People's Republic of China in the 1970s as it marked some of the first cultural exchanges between the PRC and the West. This practice has been termed "Panda Diplomacy".

By the year 1984, however, pandas were no longer used as agents of diplomacy. Instead, China began to offer pandas to other nations only on 10-year loans. The standard loan terms include a fee of up to US$1,000,000 per year and a provision that any cubs born during the loan are the property of the People's Republic of China. Since 1998, due to a WWF lawsuit, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service only allows a U.S. zoo to import a panda if the zoo can ensure that China will channel more than half of its loan fee into conservation efforts for wild pandas and their habitat.