Photographs of giant panda keepers at China’s Wolong National Nature Reserve recently circulated online showing the staff wearing panda costumes smeared with feces and urine while they cared for the captive animals as part of an effort to minimize the natural scent of the human zookeepers, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported on Thursday.
The Hong Kong-based newspaper reported on August 25 that a Chinese social media user “posted pictures online earlier this month” of the animal keepers in giant panda costumes and the images subsequently went viral.
“The photos have been viewed 25 million times on Weibo and attracted thousands of humorous comments,” the SCMP observed, referring to China’s version of Twitter, Sina Weibo.
The Weibo user who originally shared the now-viral photos of the giant panda costumes, known as Chi Bu Pang De Xiao Wu, included a caption alongside the images in which he attempted to explain their use.
“In order to erase human beings in the memory of the pandas, these panda cubs will only interact with the keepers dressed in panda costumes. The clothes are also smeared with bear’s faeces and urine,” he wrote.
China’s Science and Technology Daily recently interviewed one of the academics responsible for the costumes, Liu Dingzhen, as relayed by the SCMP. The Beijing Normal University professor said that he and other giant panda experts were training staff at Wolong National Nature Reserve in Sichuan, China, in 2008 when the expert team floated the idea that the zookeepers wear panda costumes while interacting with the endangered animals.
“We hope after years of training, these pandas will avoid human beings, rather than relying on them when they are released into nature,” Liu, who also serves as secretary-general of China Zoological Society and the Animal Behaviour Society of China, told the newspaper.
“Later we even put the faeces and urine on the suits aiming to make the pandas believe this is a real panda, not a human,” he added.
Liu and his team concluded that giant panda suits for zookeepers were “effective” after they observed the pandas’ behavior during training activities conducted after the staff started to wear the costumes. They also observed what they described as validation for the method in the behavior of the pandas after some were released into the wild. The freed animals had only interacted with humans in giant panda costumes prior to their release.
“For example, at the reserve when a panda cub was left alone while its mother went to look for food, if it heard a sound of humans it would hide and observe quietly instead of approaching them,” Liu said.
There are 1,864 giant pandas alive in the wild according to a July 2021 estimate by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). There are 673 pandas living in captivity according to data from China’s National Forestry and Grassland Administration.
“The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) lists the giant panda as ‘vulnerable,’ which is the category between ‘near threatened’ and ‘endangered,'” the WWF reported last year.
“The best scientific estimates indicate that there are less than 2,200 Giant Pandas remaining in the world today,” according to the website of Pandas International.