It’s Easy to Fall in Love With a Panda. But Do They Love Us Back?

From a distance, a panda seems like it would be easy to love. As the French philosopher Roland Barthes once put it, the adorable is marked by an enchanting formlessness, and few things are as enchantingly formless as a giant panda’s color-blocked visage. Their antics, likewise, are similarly irresistible, recognizably silly in a way no other species can match: What other animal could delight us quite so much by simply tumbling down a snowy hill?
 Nicole MacCorkle, a giant panda keeper at the National Zoo, knows that joy well.
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