BEIJING — Everyone needs some chicken soup for the soul — even pandas.
The Wuhan Zoo in central China has been feeding its two pandas home-cooked chicken soup twice in a month to reduce stress and give them a nutritional boost, a zoo official said Friday.
He Zhihua said 3-year-old Xiwang and Weiwei — literally meaning “Hope” and “Greatness” — were tired and suffering from a little shock since the weeklong National Day holiday began on Monday. The zoo was swarmed with noisy visitors.
“They had been getting less sleep, and they had to run around more,” he said. “We felt it would be good to give them the soup because they were fatigued and had a bit of a shock.”
The pandas were served 2.2 pounds of soup in giant dishes, in addition to their regular diet of bamboo, milk and buns, He said. It was a hit.
“They drank it all like they drank their milk. They loved it,” he said.
Pandas’ diets usually consist mostly of bamboo, but they also can eat meat, Zhihua said, and in the wild they sometimes catch insects and small birds.
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