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Universal Remedy?
Zookeepers tried new dish after animals got stressed by holiday crowd in China
AP File Photo
Visitors crowd around a giant panda at a Beijing zoo. Such human attention at the Wuhan Zoo in central China was just too much.
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Published: October 4, 2008
BEIJING - Everyone needs some chicken soup for the soul -- even pandas.
The Wuhan Zoo in central China has fed its two pandas home-cooked chicken soup twice in a month to reduce stress and give them extra nutrition, a zoo official said yesterday.
He Zhihua said that 3-year-old Xiwang and Weiwei -- "Hope" and "Greatness" -- were tired and suffering from stress because of the start Monday of the weeklong National Day holiday, one of the biggest travel seasons of the year.
On Wednesday, as many as 30,000 people swarmed the zoo and about 1,000 of them packed the panda enclosure, shouting to get the animals' attention, He said. The pandas paced restlessly.
"They had been getting less sleep, and they had to run around more," he said. "We felt it would be good to give them the soup because they were fatigued and had a bit of a shock."
Reflecting the Chinese tradition of drinking slow-cooked chicken soup for health, the zookeepers boiled roosters in water overnight and added a pinch of salt to the concentrated stock.
The pandas were given about 2 pounds of soup in giant dishes, in addition to their regular diet of bamboo, milk and buns, He said.
It was a hit.
"They drank it all like they drank their milk. They loved it," he said.
Pandas' diets usually consist mostly of bamboo, but He said that in the wild they sometimes catch insects and birds.
Xiwang and Weiwei arrived at the Wuhan Zoo in June from the Wolong Nature Reserve in neighboring Sichuan province. The reserve moved most of its pandas after it was damaged by a major earthquake in May.
The two were first fed chicken soup Sept. 28 to set them up for the coming cold weather.
"Autumn is coming, and we wanted them to have some more nutrition. It will be easier for them to pass the winter," He said. "We just wanted to see whether they liked the soup and whether it's good for their strength and whether they would have stomach problems."
The soup agreed with the pandas, and it was served a second time this week.
He said that Dudu, another panda at the zoo, lived on milk and ground meat in the last 10 years of his life because his teeth could no longer manage tough bamboo stalks. He died in 1999.
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