A screenshot from a video on Twitter, showing a human-like bear in a Chinese zoo.
Visitors crowd a zoo in east China’s Zhejiang province after a video of one of its bears went viral, with some netizens suggesting it looked so human it could being a staff member in a bear costume, local media reported Tuesday.
Visitor numbers at Hangzhou Zoo have risen 30% to around 20,000 a day since a video of the sun bear, named Angela, became a trending topic on Chinese social media over the weekend , in Zhejiang province. Chao News reported.
“After seeing this bear standing up online, I wanted to see what it looked like in real life, so I came here,” said a man surnamed You, who said he only half believed to the video he had seen online. Chao News reported.
“After seeing the video on the Internet, we specially took the high-speed train from Suzhou to come and see the bear,” another visitor, Qian Ming, told a Hangzhou TV station. “We traveled last night to get here. The bears are so cute.”
In the widely shared video posted last Thursday, the sun bear, also known as the sun bear, can be seen standing on its hind legs and stretching its neck as it faces visitors watching from the outside from his enclosure, before sitting down again.
It was when Angela stood up that some netizens said she looked like someone wearing a bear costume.
“If it’s wrong, it deserves an Oscar for special effects,” said a user on the Weibo microblogging platform.
The zoo sought to refute the rumor in posts on its official WeChat account and in interviews with local media, saying Angela is “definitely not a human”.
“Our zoo is run by the government, so this kind of thing wouldn’t happen,” a staff member said, according to local media. “The temperature in the summer is almost 40 degrees, if you put on a fur suit, you definitely won’t be able to last more than a few minutes without lying down.”
