National Post (National Edition)
CALGARY ZOO CRATE TRAINING PANDAS FOR THEIR TRIP HOME TO CHINA.
10-YEAR STAY
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.
Now their 10-year visit has been cut short by COVID-19 and pandemic interruptions to their supply of precious bamboo. And the Calgary Zoo, where Er Shun and Da Mao have been living since March 2018, is waiting on permits from the Canadian and Chinese governments to have them shipped back home to China — because they’re running out of food.
When the Calgary Zoo finally does send back the pandas to China, the two animals will fly at the height of luxury, with plenty of room to move around and their favourite food to snack the time away.
“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.
Pandas eat pretty much exclusively bamboo, around 40 kilograms — almost 90 pounds — per day. Because of COVID-19, the “bamboo supply lines” have been disrupted, with no real fall-back option for top quality bamboo for the pandas.
“That’s the issue that is precipitating our decision to move the pandas back to China,” Lanthier said.
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.
Lanthier said Canada’s climate cannot grow a sustainable source of bamboo for the pandas, and greenhouses cannot grow enough. “Forty kilograms of bamboo per animal per day, that’s a lot of bamboo.”
The zoo is hoping the permits will be expedited to get the pandas back to China where there’s more food supply. If things drag on too long, warm summer temperatures make it more difficult to transport the animals.
“What we need now is the government agencies to understand the urgency of the matter,” Lanthier said.
Meanwhile, the pandas’ handlers are working on getting them comfortable in the crates they’ll be in when flown around the world. It’s rather like crate-training a dog, with plenty of positive reinforcement, play with handlers in the crate and, of course, it’s where they’ll go if they want bamboo.
“We are training the animals to get in the crate, to be very, very comfortable in the crate,” Lanthier said. “We want them to understand this is a safe space for them.”
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 stressfree. The zoo is still sorting out how to make that happen at a time of social distancing.
When the Smithsonian’s National Zoo in the United States sent its panda, Bei Bei, back to China, he flew in a steel and Plexiglas crate, built by FedEx, which weighed more than 360 kilograms (800 pounds), and was flown on a dedicated FedEx 777F plane.
Bei Bei had 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of bamboo, 0.9 kilograms (two pounds) of apples and pears, some biscuits, 0.9 kilograms (two pounds) of cooked sweet potato and water. FedEx also flew Er Shun and Da Mao to Canada. Lanthier said there are requests out to at least four airlines or cargo companies to fly them back home. FedEx declined to comment on the move.
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.
Rob Laidlaw, the executive director of Zoocheck, an animal protection group, said it’s “probably a good thing” that the pandas are headed back to China.
“We’re opposed to these basically revenue-centric and entertainment kinds of uses of animals, and the panda loan program is probably the most high-profile of those types of programs in zoos,” said Laidlaw.
“As far as we’re concerned, get them out of there. Conservation work with pandas should be occurring in China, not here,” Laidlaw said.