Thursday, October 11, 2007

Red Pandas: Fire Cats or Fox Coons?


The Knoxville Zoo has just opened an exhibit of red pandas!! Opening a new open air facility and adding to their collection of seven pandas.

The red panda, native to the Himalayas, gets cranky in temperatures above 75 degrees (who doesn't?).

91 red pandas have been born at the Knoxville Zoo, a birthrate second only to a zoo in the Netherlands.

91 pandas and they only own seven? Is this some sort of elaborately luxurious puppy mill?

3 comments:

Frank said...

They might not own them. I know with giant pandas, China owns them but leases them to zoos. It could be the same deal with the red panda. Also, there are certain zoos that specialize in captive breeding, but end up sending a lot of their progeny to other zoos or to be released back into the wild. Plus, even the biggest zoo only has so much room, so they can't keep them all.

Nick McGlynn said...

they are very cute! I have never seen a red panda before, i have only seen the black and white version.

Frank said...

I just got back from a Google trip, and it looks like red pandas have a breeding program that's partly focused on keeping inbreeding down. There seem to be, therefore, a lot of transfer of different red pandas from zoo to zoo to facilitate this.