China's top panda experts, after studying a renegade giant panda for more than a year, still don't know why it gave up its natural diet of bamboo and began killing sheep, an official said Monday.
The panda killed and ate 26 sheep between February and December 1990 before being captured and taken to the Wolong nature preserve in southwest China's Sichuan province, said Zhang Liming, director of the provincial Forestry Department's section, which oversees the preserve.He said scientists at the preserve, which specializes in pandas, have been studying the sheep-eating panda since early 1991 but still haven't figured out why it turned carnivorous.
Zhang said only one other meat-eating panda has been discovered in China. That panda attacked and ate eight sheep outside the provincial capital of Chengdu in early 1991 but apparently gave up the meat diet on its own.
Normally, pandas are herbivores. Their diet consists almost solely of 22 to 40 pounds of bamboo each day.
Only 1,100 to 1,500 pandas remain in the wild.