Panda Birth

So I've been pretty immersed in birth culture and newborn babies lately. I'm looking up this, researching that, photographing all of the above . . . generally all about little babies and their pregnant mothers.

In today's time wasting episode of surfing the web I came across this video of a giant panda in Japan giving birth:

Panda Birth

Apparently it is the first giant panda in Japan to give birth by artificial insemination . . . so it has made an impact on the news.


I have watched humans give birth. I have watched dogs and cats and mice give birth. I have watched videos of numerous other mammals give birth. None of that prepared me for the sight of that new panda!! Somewhere in the recesses of my mind I knew that panda babes were small . . . but this is nuts! I looked it up, and according to The National Zoo "At birth, the cub is helpless, and it takes considerable effort on the mother's part to raise it. A newborn cub weighs three to five ounces and is about the size of a stick of butter. Pink, hairless, and blind, the cub is 1/900th the size of its mother. Except for a marsupial (such as the kangaroo or opossum), a giant panda baby is the smallest mammal newborn relative to its mother's size."

My last babies averaged about 1/12th my size. Seems a little unfair, yes?