A gorilla drinks soup from a bottle in Guangdong Zoo in South China's Guangdong Province. Photo: Sina Weibo

 The latest news shows that drinking soup is no longer the preserve of humans. At a zoo in Guangzhou, South China's Guangdong Province, several orangutans looked like they were enjoying themselves as they drank soup through spoons and milk bottles in the scorching heat.

The video shows keepers at the Guangzhou Zoo with long soup spoons scooping out different kinds of soup from pots and feeding it to the orangutans across their cages. Later, the orangutans drank soup from milk bottles of themselves.

The zoo's staffer said in an interview with The Paper that giving the orangutans soup is a routine feeding practice. The soup provided to the orangutans some kinds of nutritious soup suitable for them to drink, such as radish soup and carrot soup.

Recently, because of the hot summer weather, the zoo started giving orangutans soups to help them cool down from the heat, she said.

Guangzhou is a city in southern China known for its cuisine and soup is a very important part of Guangzhou's food culture. One netizen teased on China's Twitter-like platform Sina Weibo, "You guys really deserve to be Guangzhou's orangutans. You can skip meals, but you have to have soup!"

Global Times