大象传媒

In the spring of 1869, much of the chatter around London Zoo was of a new arrival. Shipped from the Himalayas, it was said to be an odd combination of a raccoon and a bear and was called the 'little firefox' or red panda. But all was not well. Zoo superintendent, Papa Bartlett, had been trying to feed his latest charge fresh meat. But it had refused to eat and was now very weak indeed. Almost in desperation, he took the starving panda into the Zoo's gardens. After a few unsteady steps it lunged for the flowerbed and there, to everyone's surprise, began to eat. The new carnivore, Papa Bartlett realised, was a vegetarian. The same confusion may well have surrounded its black and white namesake from China: the giant panda. The two pandas have a lot in common. Both are vegetarians and both have a sixth finger or thumb to grasp the bamboo better. But being descended from meat-eaters, they have the wrong digestive system for low-energy vegetables. To survive they have to bulk-load their greens. The giant panda confounded the Victorians but today we know that it's simply a carnivore that become an unexpected, specialist vegetarian. It's the least adaptable modern member of two surviving carnivore families - the bears and the raccoons. And it's kept its nutritional options open.