[chrish]

A DRUNK Chinese tourist bit a panda at the Beijing Zoo after the animal attacked him when he jumped into the enclosure and tried to hug it.

Zhang Xinyan had drunk four pitchers of beer at a restaurant before "stumbling to the zoo" nearby and stopping off at the pen holding a sleeping six-year-old male panda, Gu Gu, on Tuesday.
"He felt a sudden urge to touch the panda with his hand" and jumped over a waist-high railing down into the enclosure, the Beijing Morning Post said. "When he got closer and was undiscovered, he reached out to hug it."

Startled, Gu Gu bit Zhang in the right leg. Zhang, 35, got angry and kicked the panda, who then bit his other leg. A tussle ensued.

"I bit the fellow in the back," Zhang was quoted as saying in the newspaper. "Its skin was quite thick."

Other tourists yelled for a zookeeper, who soon got the panda under control by spraying it with water, reports said. Zhang was hospitalised.

Newspaper photographs showed Zhang lying on a hospital bed with blood-soaked bandages and several seams of stitches running down his leg.

Ye Mingxia, a spokeswoman for the Beijing Zoo, said Gu Gu was "healthy and uninjured".