Experts from Wolong National Nature Reserve believe interaction with researchers in these goofy looking costumes may increase a panda cub’s chance of survival once introduced to the wild.

"Well, it's funny looking but hey, whatever works!" said one employee when asked of the outfits.

In 2006, the research team introduced a captive-born male cub into the wild, only to have it tragically rejected and killed by its free-roaming brethren, according to the Washington Post.

Legend of a Rabbit (Tu Xia Chuan Qi), a 3D animated film from Tianjin Film Studio and Beijing Film Academy, premiered in China earlier this month. [tip: Andrew Pam]

Featuring a variety of anthropomorphic animals and kung-fu sequences, Legend of a Rabbit had a budget of RMB120 million ($18 million), required 500 animators, and was in production for over three years.

BBC News reports that two liger cubs, the offspring of a male lion and a female tiger, are being nursed by a dog at the Xixiakou Wildlife Zoo in China after the cubs' mother stopped feeding them. The ligers are very rare and are believed to only result from matings in captivity.

The Guardian reports that staff at Hetaoping Research and Conservation Centre for the Giant Panda have taken to wearing panda costumes when caring for young animals, to avoid habituating them to human contact.

There are a couple of terrific pictures in the article.

The BBC reports on the spread of Chinese tiger-farms, now estimated to contain more tigers than currently in the wild. The farms are popular destinations for tourists, but allegedly contain wineries in which the bones of dead animals are steeped to produce tiger bone wine.

As international law forbids the sale of tiger products, lion bones are often used - their price has reportedly risen 30-fold in the past two years.

BBC Sport has unveiled a title animation featuring several anthropomorphic animals as part of their coverage of the Beijing Olympics.^[1]

Created by Jamie Hewlett, illustrator of the virtual band Gorillaz and with music by Gorillaz creator Damon Albarn, the animation is based on Journey to the West; an ancient Chinese tale of pilgrimage to retrieve Buddhist scriptures which mixes adventure, allegory, and spiritual enlightenment. Both band members were born in the Year of the Monkey, and were fans of the British TV series Monkey.^[2][3]

Depicted in the animation are lead characters Sūn Wùkōng, the Monkey King, and his golden-banded staff; Xuánzàng the monk; Zhū Bājiè (or Pigsy), once field marshal of the Milky Way, wielding his rake; and Shā Wùjìng (Sandy), an immortal banished from heaven for smashing a crystal goblet, with his monk's spade.

The same story inspired elements of manga and anime such as Dragon Ball, InuYasha, and Ranma ½.

The long-eared jerboa is a small desert mouse with a long tail, enormous ears, and kangaroo-like legs. It lives in China's Gobi Desert, and although little-known, is endangered.

The first-known live footage of this animal is available at this link, and was recently featured on CNN. The long-eared jerboa is one of the mammals in the EDGE project, which is concerned with the lack of conservation effort for biologically unique mammals on the verge of extinction.

Trickster

Chinese veterinarians are showing American-born panda Hua Mei sex-education videos featuring pandas mating to prepare her Chinese panda suitors....

[Read Article]

For the first time in history, an antelope is likely to be victim to a tiger.

Two rare, endangered tiger cubs from China will be trained to hunt 7,000 miles away in South Africa, as part of a program to preserve the species. The full story via CNN is here.

A woman and her child were attacked by four escaped zoo monkeys, which then had to be shot, according to this AP article. Only the youngest monkey escaped.

A baited camera trap caught the first image of a wild Siberian tiger in north-eastern China, raising hopes that the species might return to its old haunts. The tiger was all but extinct in China from poatching, but much of its old habitat remains intact. Scientists hope migrating tiger populations from Russia and captive bred introduced animals can rebuild the population if hunting bans can be maintained.

The Moon Bear Rescue Centre in Sichuan, China has helped save 17 bears from the horrifying practice of "bile farming". The full story is here.

The centre has saved over 80 bears since 2000, but these are only a few among the thousands suffering throughout the country.

For those of you who follow world-wide internet policies, China's list of banned websites continue to grow, actively filtered out by what's colorfully coming to be called 'The Great Firewall of China'.
Out of curiosity, I began testing which websites are banned.
And the first one I entered to see reported inaccessible? Furnation.
Incredulous, I ran the test again, and a few more times. 1 successful attempt to reach it, out of 20. It leads to curious speculation; is it something as simply benign as a router misconfiguration? Perhaps a few servers along the way had conked out? Maybe Slashdot having linked the testing server has resulted in a sudden drop of reliability of the testing method?
Or maybe the mainland Chinese are afraid of teh cultural revolution that some ears and tails might unleash. (He typed firmly tongue-in-cheek.)

BEIJING — A woman breast-fed a rare monkey back to health after its life was endangered when its real mother ignored it after giving birth, the China Daily newspaper reported Monday.

Click Here For The Rest of the Article

Read the news story here.
Chinese student "tests bear intelegence" by tricking them and pouring acid on zoo bears. The common belief locally is that bears are dumb, so a university student, Liu Haiyang, set about attacking caged zoo bears to prove humans are in fact the stupider animal.