I HAVE THE ANSWER TO THIS. DUE TO SOME VERY PERSONAL EXPERIENCE.
So red pandas live in trees. They jump from treetop to treetop all the time. The reason they don’t ever slip and fall off is that their claws are basically mini grappling hooks. Those claws sink into bark and they do not let go.
Look at those honkers. They’re sharp as fuck and they’re incredibly long when not retracted. Red pandas do some serious damage when they want to, and often when they don’t want to.
Here’s a short and fun story about how I know this! Content warning for exactly the kind of medical mishap you might be imagining.
I used to volunteer at my local zoo, where we have three red pandas. One of my jobs was to take care of them. This involved training sometimes, and the main reward we used when training our red pandas was grapes. This is actually Not Great, because grapes are full of sugar, and red pandas’ natural diet includes very little sugar. So one day, we decided we were going to wean them off of grapes.
The red pandas were extremely put out about this.
I happened to be the volunteer on duty the first morning we put only 2 grapes in their breakfast dishes. The youngest of the three red pandas came down from their tree while I was cleaning up, ate those two grapes, carefully examined each piece of bamboo to make sure it wasn’t secretly a grape in disguise, and then followed me around for several minutes whining like a petulant child.
Now – one of the neat things our zoo does with visitors is Animal Encounters, and the red pandas are trained to climb very carefully onto the visitor’s shoulder, whereupon they are fed grapes. It’s cool for the visitor and the red panda gets grapes out of the deal. This young red panda couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t giving him more grapes, so he decided that obviously the answer was that I expected him to reach my shoulder.
Problem: Human keeps moving around and doesn’t stay still long enough for a gentle leg climb.
Solution: Leg fragile, but maybe shoulder like tree? Climb up tree limb nearby. Stretch claws out. Take a flying leap onto bare shoulder. OH SHIT THIS ISN’T BARK dig claws in hold on for dear life victory!
Whenever visitors asked me what the long deep scratches in my shoulder were, I happily told them I was mauled by a red panda.
They always assumed I was kidding.
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