(Singapore) Singaporeans bid an emotional farewell on Wednesday to a 2-year-old panda cub that authorities are preparing to send to China to join a species protection program.
Le Le, the first panda born in the Southeast Asian city-state, made his final public appearance at the River Wonders wildlife park before a month-long quarantine before his departure.
Dozens of visitors came to see him wander around his enclosure one last time, eating bamboo stalks and carrots that keepers had hidden under paper airplanes and in cardboard suitcases.
Among the audience was Lucilla Teoh, who describes herself as a “panda lover”, and wore a t-shirt and hat decorated with panda designs as well as sparkly panda earrings for the occasion.
The 61-year-old said she considers herself a “great aunt” to Le Le, as she has watched him grow from a small baby to a 73-kilogram youngster.
“It’s bittersweet, obviously I wish he had stayed longer,” Ms Teoh told AFP.
“But I also think he has a role to play in panda conservation, that it’s important for him to go back to China, grow up a little bit, and then hopefully he’ll be an ambassador for pandas and that he will become like his parents.”
Lydia Robangsa, who brought her nine-year-old daughter Dahlia to see Le Le for the last time, says they both feel “a little sad” to say goodbye to the panda. “I think Singapore is her home,” says the 40-year-old marketing executive.
Le Le was born in 2021 via artificial insemination. His parents, Jia Jia and Kai Kai, had failed to mate naturally.
The panda couple, aged 15 and 16, arrived in Singapore in 2012 on a loan from China. Under the agreement, his offspring were to be sent to China to join a panda protection program.
Breeding pandas – in captivity or in the wild – is notoriously difficult, experts say, because these animals are rarely in the mood to mate.
To complicate matters further, female pandas only go into heat once a year, for about two days.
Le is scheduled to fly to Chengdu on January 16 in a custom-built crate aboard a Singapore Airlines cargo plane.
China has long deployed “panda diplomacy,” lending these mammals to various countries, often to support its foreign policy goals.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature WWF, there are approximately 1,860 giant pandas left in the wild, and approximately 600 in captivity worldwide.
