Two workers at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo were bitten Friday while trying to weigh a binturong, also called a bearcat, native to tropical forests in Asia.
A worker, unnamed by D.C.’s National Zoo officials, was trying to weigh the 12-year-old female named Lola during a routine training session in a nonpublic area of the zoo’s Great Cats exhibit at around 10 a.m. when the animal bit.
Lola did not let go of the worker after the bite, and a colleague came to assist and move the binturong to a separate enclosure, at which point Lola bit that staffer as well.
The two workers, who weren’t named publicly by National Zoo officials, suffered non-life-threatening injuries and went to a hospital out of an abundance of caution.
The binturong is roughly the size of a coyote, with a tail about as long as the body. Females like Lola are larger than males, according to the National Zoo website. She arrived at the National Zoo along with 14-year-old male Hank from the Brookfield Zoo in Illinois in 2022.
Binturongs are known as bearcats because of their whiskers and stockiness but are not closely related to bears or cats. They’re most closely related to civets, another carnivorous mammal found in tropical forests across Africa and Asia.
