Forbidden Panda

People behave badly at Chinese zoos. China just doesn’t have the same standards for animal welfare, and most people aren’t as familiar with wildlife as we are in the U.S. It’s out of ignorance not malice that people feed animals through the bars and toss rocks into enclosures to make animals “do something.” That’s part of what we need zoos for – to educate people about animals.

Despite the low standards that so distressed me at the zoo in Qingdao, I got in trouble for using flash near the pandas. I didn’t mean to – my camera was set to auto, and the building wasn’t at brightly lit as I thought. But when my flash went off, a security guard came over and told me I would have to leave if I did it again. We protect what we value.