ICYMI: With stay in Canada cut short by COVID-19, pandas are being shipped home to China
EDMONTON — When Er Shun and Da Mao arrived in 2014, Canada was a different place. Stephen Harper, who had brokered the arrival of the two pandas from China, was prime minister, and part of the welcoming committee at Toronto’s Pearson International Airport, along with former Toronto mayor Rob Ford.
“There is no time for politics or delay. The welfare of the animals are at risk every week when we’re receiving shipments and trying to source bamboo,” Clément Lanthier, the president and CEO of the Calgary Zoo, told the Calgary Herald. Surprisingly, for animals that do very little — “they eat, they sleep and they fart,” said Lanthier — pandas are picky eaters and only eat parts of the bamboo plant, and only at certain points in the bamboo maturity process, when it’s about two years old.
“What we need now is the government agencies to understand the urgency of the matter,” Lanthier said. They’ll travel with loads of bamboo to last them for the time in transit. And, possibly, with their handlers, which would help keep them stress-free. The zoo is still sorting out how to make that happen at a time of social distancing.
Prior to their time in Calgary, the pandas spent several years at the Toronto Zoo. Their much-celebrated cubs, Jia Panpan and Jia Yueyue, were shipped back to China earlier this year.
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