Panda escapes enclosure in Denmark zoo

Posted by Anita Froneman on 9 June 2020

A Chinese panda escaped from its enclosure at the Copenhagen Zoo yesterday, 8 June. The bear leisurely strolled through the zoo before authorities sedated and returned it.

On a surveillance video, a 7-year-old male panda named Xing Er breaks out of the newly built, $24.2 million (R406,31 million) ‘Panda House’, according to the New York Times.

The video shows how the panda ‘crawls up a metal pole, which is studded with three rows of electrical wires … and then crawls out into the garden,’ the zoo’s chief scientist Bengt Holst told the New York Times. 

The zoo veterinarian sedated the panda and he was brought back to his enclosure. ‘There he was given an antidote and woke up a couple of minutes later,’ zoo spokesperson, Jacob Munkholm Hoeck told AFP.

The enclosure houses pandas from China’s southwestern city of Chengdu on a loan basis.

Many wildlife conservation activists have spoken out against the operation of zoos. The ethical implications of depriving animals of their natural habitats and possibly lowering their quality of life should be considered, the BBC says on their website. Preserving a species that is under threat in the wild, however forms part of the ongoing discourse, it adds.

Image credit: Twitter/33newsking






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