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People are generally fascinated by examples of other animals engaging in human-like behavior -- all the more so when that behavior involves animals seemingly outsmarting human beings. A case in point is a claim, reflected in the following meme, that a zoo-kept female panda deliberately mimicked the symptoms of pregnancy because she observed that other pregnant pandas in the zoo received special treatment: This claim originated with a 2014 report from the Chinese state-run press agency Xinhua, detailing how a planned live broadcast of the birth of panda cubs at the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Research Center had been canceled when it was discovered that the expectant mother-to-be was not actually pregnant. A quote from a panda expert cited in the report suggested that some clever pandas who experienced phantom pregnancies would deliberately continue to exhibit pregnancy symptoms afterwards in order to fool their keepers into providing them with special treatment: But another panda expert quickly walked that claim back, asserting that the behavior was due to hormonal changes rather than purposeful trickery and had been observed in both captive and wild pandas: The meme displayed above erroneously attributed this claim to a panda kept at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo rather than at a facility in China. However, the former did report a case of panda pseudopregnancy in 2019:
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