Is That a Panda? Or a Dog in Disguise?

You’re running a zoo. But visitors are clamoring for something different, more exotic.

You aren’t lucky enough to possess Moo Deng, the popular pygmy hippo from Thailand. In fact, you haven’t been able to get a hold of anything impressive or cute or charming enough to impress the masses on TikTok. What to do?

Have you considered simply disguising a prosaic animal as something more exciting?

Before you dismiss the idea as something from a bad ’80s comedy or a stoned late-night rap session, consider that it’s been done. Quite a few times.

Social media was awash last spring with images of chow chow dogs at Taizhou Zoo in Jiangsu Province, China, who were dyed black and white to look like pandas, the animal that is probably the world’s biggest zoo attraction.

Zoo officials shrugged off criticism at the time, with one telling The Qilu Evening News, via NBC that the subterfuge was akin to people dyeing their hair. More recently, visitors noticed signs fessing up and calling the so-called pandas “painted dogs.”

Taizhou Zoo was not the first place to come up with the idea. Owners of a traveling circus in Italy were charged in 2014 with disguising, yes, chow chows as pandas who posed for pictures with customers before the show. The circus was shut down.

But dogs can play more than just pandas. In Louhe, China, in 2013, a Tibetan mastiff was passed off as a lion. And at the same zoo, a dog was imitating a wolf and a fox was imitating a leopard, reported Beijing Youth Daily, via NPR.