Sunday, November 25, 2007

It's Panda-monium!

The folks at the San Diego Zoo are thrilled to have a couple of highly reproductive pandas in their midst. Bai Yun and Gao Gao have been burning it up since 1993 and their frolicking has produced three little baby pandas. It may not sound like many, but pandas are hideously bad breeders, especially in captivity. The multiple offspring make Bai Yun and Gao Gao the Irish Catholics of the Giant Panda Kingdom. Perhaps these two have been sneaking out of the zoo for Sunday Mass and a pint of Guiness.

Female pandas, it seems, can only conceive for three days out of every year. And you wonder why there are less than 2000 of them left on the planet? Us layman call that your bad genetic planning. It also explains that sad look in their eyes. For 362 days out of the year, they have the sex drive of a Dungeons and Dragon Master on Paxil.

But you have to love the sense of humor of people whose job it is to encourage pandas to do the nasty.
But when Bai Yun enters her brief fertile periods, zookeepers make sure Gao Gao is there, sniffing her through a perforated gate zookeepers call the "howdy door" until her chirps and bleats indicate she's ready to get down to business.
The howdy door?! Oh you can bet that's going to become a catch phrase around our house.

The newest Panda Jr. will be officially named in a ceremony on Monday. I hope they call him Howdy Duty.

1 comment:

lisamagisa said...

Panda porn is very rare too, because (little known fact) pandas love to chew on porn-couches so the movies never get made.