Here’s the situation: Following your sudden urge to pet a live panda, and urge only heightened by alcohol, you’ve jumped into the bear den where the loveable-looking creature is taking a much-deserved panda nap.

It’s just lying there. Of course you should pet it.

Stay calm, you tell yourself, they’re endangered. How dangerous can they be?

Were these the thoughts of one Zhang Xinyan, 35, who performed the scenario above on Wednesday? We have no way to know. But the scene turns quickly from tranquil to terrifying, when the panda, remembering that he’s a bear, wakes up and bites Zhang on the leg. He kicks back, putting his other leg right into that toothy maw.

So now you’re really in trouble. The panda has taken chunks from both your legs, and you are beginning to realize why the word “petting” appeared nowhere near the word “zoo” on the entrance sign. What do you do?

“I bit the fellow in the back,” AP quoted Zhang saying, sourcing a local paper. “Its skin was quite thick.”

Yes. Bite the bear. It really makes for a great headline, straight out of that intro-to-journalism course I took at UC Santa Cruz. “That’s man-bites-dog,” my mentor used to say when a good story came up. Except this is man-bites-panda, and you really can’t get anymore man-bites-dog than that.

The AP story continues:

Other tourists yelled for a zookeeper, who got the panda under control by spraying it with water, reports said. Zhang was hospitalized.

Newspaper photographs showed Zhang lying on a hospital bed with blood-soaked bandages and a seam of stitches running down his leg.

The Beijing Youth Daily quoted Zhang as saying that he had seen pandas on television and “they seemed to get along well with people.”

“No one ever said they would bite people,” Zhang said. “I just wanted to touch it. I was so dizzy from the beer. I don’t remember much.”

So, we come back to the drink. Zhang apparently drank a few jugs before diving into the bear’s den. At this time, I think it’s best we remember the wise words of Homer:

“Ah, beer. The cause of, and solution to, all life’s problems.”

Editor’s note: This is a story dripping with possible headlines. Here are some others I considered:
Of People and Pandas
Man Bites Panda, Dog Remains Best Friend
Mmmm…. Panda….
What’s black and white and red all over? A panda eating a tourist.
Don’t be a pandavore
Pandas are people-vores

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 20th, 2006 at 8:09 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.