Giving in to Bao Bao

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It has been suggested, by a certain psychologist reader and friend, that I am not coming clean on this cute cuddly animal thing.  And I have come to believe that it might indeed be good for my mental health to admit that, like everyone else, I am a sucker for a good cute cuddly animal picture (CCAP).  Last week the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, DC introduced their five month old panda cub, Bao Bao, and, well what can I say, it’s a baby panda and the only thing cuter than a panda bear is a baby panda bear.  Friends, I cannot resist a panda bear and, yes, I will rush to the National Zoo as soon as I can.

And while I’m confessing to this foible, I need also to admit a love of everything sea otter and everything cat.  I am an ailurophile through and through.  I have learned a lot from my cat.  As our old friend Mark Twain pointed out about cats as teachers:

“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.”
But I digress.  As for Bao Bao and his kin pandas, many years ago Disney did a study of what features in a face define cuteness and elicit a giant:
AWWW!
 The panda bear is quintessentially cuteness personified.  Did I mention that Bao Bao means “precious” or “treasure’ in Mandarin?
We have spoken in this blog about a lot of great photographs of terrible events.  So it feels good to speak about something wonderful.  In the end that is the very point about CCAPs.  They make us happy, and no one can say that making people happy is any less a noble purpose of a photograph than making them sad.
All right, all right!  Do I get to post a picture of a baby panda now?  I included a link above showing five month old Bao Bao’s debut.  Figure 1 is an image from the Wikipedia by Colegota showing a one week old Panda in 2005 at the Chengdu’s Giant Panda Breeding Research Base in China.  What more can I say but
AWWW!
Figure 1 - 1 week old giant panda cub. Image from the Wikipedia by Colegota and in the public domain under common attribution license.

Figure 1 – 1 week old giant panda cub at Chendu’s Giant Panda Breeding Research Base in China . Image from the Wikipedia by Colegota and in the public domain under common attribution license.