"Interpretation of Laboratory Results for Small Animal Clinicians" enjoys Pompeii.

Lajana went downhill and was put to sleep today.

Biking round China is an experience. There are so many bikes, and they have poor brakes and no suspension but they all have very loud bells. It's pretty flat round here, everyone bikes. Even the carts are modified bikes. And the Chinese have an amazing ability to balance a million things and people on the back of bikes... One of the translators can just sit casually on the back of my bike while I wobble down the road, but if we swop positions I just fall off sideways... the Chinese workers at the centre think it's hilarious...

Peanuts coated with MSG give you bizarre and fantastic dreams.

All the bears are fine and very bear-like. Here is a picture of Sally's nose while I was giving her her fruit-and-Baytril smoothie.

Gave the bears shrimp paste for the first time today... we mixed nuts into the foul-smelling stuff and hid it in hollow logs.

And now we watch 100kg animals rolling around like kittens with catnip. Chelsey and Lia LURVE the shrimp paste, they're rubbing their heads all over it.. Even Kevin was on his back holding the log in his hind paws. Sepp is apparently terrified of the smell though, hasn't been near his yet...

Went to the local hospital to find out about blood machines for my project...

I had to meet the director and make complimentary comments about their machines as if I knew what I was talking about, and they were really nice and gave us tea, and free notebooks for no reason, and having a translator is weird and cool.

The bears're all settling in nicely. S212 Lia has stopped trying to kill everyone, except when she thinks you're taking food away from her. Big boy has been named Agathon, or as the vet puts it: "AGATHON (preceded by four drum beats)". He's doing great, his stomach is going down... he keeps farting...

The public name the bears; we've got Chelsey, Lia, Sally, Back, Sepp, Bluebelle, Agathon/Bigboy, Ria, Sophie and Kevin.

Kevin's actually really sweet, he's missing one of his front paws but it doesn't seem to hinder him much. Here's a photo of him with a frozen chocolate milk carton. We give them enrichment items three times a day so they don't get bored... noise toys, nuts hidden in bamboo, oats wrapped in little parcels...

Got back home late to find a plastic bag full of bear bile products on the step of the hospital, so I took them upstairs since they're probably worth a hell of a lot of money. They look unopened... There's eyedrops in there. Everyone's a little puzzled by this.

We went to the Chengdu panda centre today. Pandas don't do much. There were red pandas too, they were very cool. And baby pandas! And young pandas, who did actually move around and fall off things very slowly. It's odd how the Chinese government treats xiong maos with so much reverence when the hei xiongs are forgotten.

There were some American tourists paying large number of red notes (100RMBs) to put on blue shoe covers and plastic gloves and stroke a panda while it's distracted with food. It seemed bloody dubious.

Apparently there were only supposed to be 10 bears because 2 were deemed too ill to come, but the workers at the farm loaded all 12 by mistake.

Day off but I spent it with Twiglet's postmortem. He had some heart lesions, no

fat at ALL and so dehydrated. The general consensus is he died of starvation, dehydration which may have caused kidney failure, and septicaemia. His free-drip hole was completely closed at skin level, so the farmer would have been unable to extract bile, but there was a mess of infection around the gall bladder and the bile looked like nothing anyone's ever seen.

Bear S208 ("Message") in the other room was found to have a huge liver tumour so she was put to sleep on the table.

Everyone is exhausted. Cutting up dead things all day is depressing. I sliced my finger with a scalpel.

Somebody did that to that bear. Somebody took him from the wild and put him in a cage and let him starve to death. Incomprehension.

Moving the body was easy, he weighed nothing.