The Hunt for Red Panda: The Hunt Begins

The time has come for Honza and I to leave behind family, friends, iPods, laptops and salaries, for the wilds of a foreign land. In narrowing our search we set our sights on a small creature, often mistaken as innocuous, cuddly, a thing to be welcomed into ones arms rather than repelled at all cost. The red panda, Ailurus fulgens, the bloodthirsty mammal capable of dominating a prey four times its size, hides behind its raccoon-like mask the markings of an untamed killer comparable only to the fierce Grizzly, or the Yeti which shares its habitat.

Endemic to the temperate forests of the Himalayas, the red panda is not an easy find. Protected by the staunch conservation regulations of China and Bhutan, we had to choose a more lax region if we intended to capture the panda for our psychospiritual development course in lowering hostility among arboreal mammals. Thus, we settled on Sikkim-a province in northeastern India notorious for its blackmarket red panda trade. Little do the smugglers know, our plan for the creatures is quite contrary to the stock souvenir trade of capturing the pandas' gratuitously long and fluffy tails.

Our task will not be easy, for, if this is an animal capable of inflicting suffering and humiliation to its own kind as the video below portrays, one can only wonder how it will respond to an entirely foreign species:

So, we are off! We fly tonight, first to Delhi, then on to Bagdora Airport in Silguri, West Bengal. Wish us luck, as the red panda has been known to attack Jeeps en route to Gangtok, Sikkim, taking for its prisoner naive and unsuspecting tourists.