Photo by clarissa~.

At his eponymous Slate blog, Tom Scocca notes — in a post titled “Puny and Decadent American-Bred Panda Is Being Retrained to Chinese Standards,” which, by the way, incorrectly attributes the “Butterstick” moniker to Wonkette and not its actual creator — that after ripping him away from us, the Chinese found our beloved Butterstick to be, well, not up to standard:

According to a report from the Xinhua News Agency, his new keepers at the China Conservation and Research Center for Giant Pandas, in Sichuan, were not as impressed by him as a representative of his kind:

“When Tai Shan arrived in early February from the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington DC, he weighed only 87 kg – a weight considered too light for a four-and-a-half-year-old panda. And he used to have a big belly, which meant he lacked exercise.”

[…]

Under the food-and-exercise regimen, Tai Shan has

“gained more than 20 kg and now eats at least 50 kg of bamboo, 2 kg of carrots and 2 kg of panda cakes – made with corn, eggs and honey – a day. Huang said that after Tai Shan arrived, the center not only fed him more food, but helped him get into shape. “We used to spread the food around so Tai Shan was forced to walk around the big area to find the food,” Huang said. “Now, he is much stronger and has a better body shape. And his hair is more lustrous.”

Pardon me? More lustrous? What, it wasn’t enough to just take away the best damn thing that this town had going for it, so you had to throw salt in the wound by calling him, in so many words, a fat American? Man, I haven’t been this outraged at something involving large animals since Scar engineered Mufasa’s death, then blamed it on Simba.