I said  ‘Aaaaaah’ and ‘Awwwww!’ throughout; hopefully you’ll find it as relaxing as I did.

The video is after a cut because it starts itself when the page loads and that drives me insane!

A researcher dressed in a panda costume puts a panda cub into a box before its physical examination at the Hetaoping Research and Conservation Center for the Giant Panda in Wolong National Nature Reserve, Sichuan province December 3, 2010. The 4-month old cub, the first in the centre to be trained for reintroduction into the wild, is monitored by hidden cameras. Researchers performing physical examinations on the cub wear panda costumes to ensure that the cub’s environment is devoid of human influence, according to local media.

Source: Reuters

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Isn’t the cub such a cutie?! I’d wait until January to see the little one. Of course, by then she won’t be so little!

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There’s only one word for it when this young cub got sight of his first ever snow – panda-monium.

Giant panda cub Fu Long was clearly delighted to be frolicking with his proud mum at Vienna’s Schönbrunn zoo as heavy snow covered the whole of Europe.

And 18-month-old Fu Long really got a taste for snow – gobbling down mouthfuls of the stuff as if it was ice cream, said his keepers at the Austrian zoo.

Isn’t he too cute for words?!

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If I wasn’t in the midst of finals and graduation during the time that this WWF trip is scheduled (May 4 – May 17, 2009), I would definitely be saving up for it – it looks so fun!

Not only do you get to tour all the best parts of China, you get to spend three days with the pandas! I think the $5,890 they’re booking this for is extremely reasonable – especially for a 2 week vacation, don’t you?

So jealous. Some day I will have enough money and time to go to China. *Sigh*

Check out  the trip brochure here.

When will people learn to respect animals, not only in the zoo, but in general? I don’t feel a bit of sympathy for the man, who I refuse to call the ‘victim’.

The real victim is Gu Gu.

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Look. At. That. Adorable. Fuzzy! Panda.

One-month-old twin panda cubs are held by zoo keepers during their first appearance before the public at Adventure World in Shirahama in central Japan over the weekend. The cubs — one female and one male — were born Sept. 13. It’s unclear why the female, on the left, appears to be having a bad hair day.

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Three-year-old Xiwang and Weiwei were unsettled by the tens of thousands of visitors to Wuhan Zoo during last week’s National holidays.

The pair, whose names mean “Hope” and “Greatness” in Chinese, began pacing restlessly around their enclosure, according to He Zhihua, their keeper.

“They had been getting less sleep,” he said. “We felt it would be good to give them the soup because they were fatigued and had a bit of a shock.”

Chicken soup is a traditionally medicinal food in China, and each panda was given a litre of homemade soup in addition to its regular diet of bamboo, milk and buns. “They loved it,” said Mr He. “They drank it like they drank their milk.”

Although pandas have a taste for bamboo, they are not averse to eating meat in the wild, occasionally devouring birds and insects. Another panda at the zoo, Dudu, was fed ground meat for the last decade of his life because his teeth became too weak to chew through bamboo.

Xiwang and Weiwei are refugees from the Wolong Panda Reserve in Sichuan, which was affected by the 7.9 magnitude earthquake that struck the province in May.

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