The Giant Panda

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23263, 4 February 1939, Page 11 (Supplement)

The Giant Panda

"The Baby Giant Panda," by Ruth Harkness, a ;story of the infant education of a giant panda, is meant for young readeru. But really this is everybody's pictum-book, with its entrancing photographs of tho baby panda, all woolly helplessness, clinging and crawling, rolling 011 the rug, climbing trees, shrinking from the camera or peering with its black-circled eyes, from behind the bars of a nursery pen. When the book was written, this was the first and only giant panda to be captured (though since then Mrs. Harkness has found it a companion). The panda, in fact, was an unknown quantity; the zoologists themselves did not know how to feed it. Mrs. Harkness brought the little creature, which was only a week or ten days old when she found it, from the far western mountains of China to Shanghai across tho Pacific to San Francisco, finally across America to New York. It travelled by aeroplane and fast train; it was held up by the customs at Shanghai and then allowed to sail on a ticket with the laconic remark, "One dog—2o dollars"; it went to the annual banquet of the Explorers' Club of New York, and, interviewed before the microphone, vouchsafed tho statement, "I'm hungry." Now it is a permanent resident at the Chicago Zoo, living on lottuce, celery, and cereals, climbing trees, and resolutely refusing to tolerate the company of dogs. In time a park is to be "specially built" for it, .with trees and a running stream.