A zoo in eastern China has been forced to put our a statement confirming that yes, its bears are actually bears. As opposed to what, you may wonder? Apparently, many visitors have suspected that their sun bears are actually human actors in costumes.
Now, to be fair, there have been plenty of times that I've thought a sun bear looked like a person in a bear costume doing a lousy job of pretending to be a bear. They don't look especially bearish - more like some sort of weird pig-dog hybrid, and their movements and postures are just kind of goofy.
Also, it's not like a Chinese zoo hasn't pulled a scam like this before. A Tibetan mastiff was once passed off as a very unconvincing lion. Nor are these shenanigans all Chinese in origin. A Palestinian zoo was found to have been painting stripes on a donkey in a "build your own zebra" scheme that didn't seem to fool too many people.
Likewise, I've seen plenty of visitors to American zoos convinced that animals - especially reptiles - are fake. Visitors to my zoo one day were particularly positive that the crocodiles weren't real. At the time, the crocs were hanging out in the back corner of the exhibit, barely visible, underneath a waterfall that left them as little more than dark, blurry shapes beneath the roiling surface of the water. If they were fake, I argued back (with mixed success), wouldn't we at least have placed them somewhere were people could at least kind of see them?
Hangzhou Zoo released a statement (ostensibly written by one of the sun bears) to defend their honor and the authenticity of their bears. I don't know if that'll really convince anyone, though. After all, isn't that the exact sort of thing that a person in a bear costume would say if they were trying to trick us?
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