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Ling-Ling Dies
Suddenly Ling-Ling, the female half of the National Zoo's fuzzy and beloved pair of rare giant pandas, died suddenly yesterday of unknown causes... ...Hsing-Hsing, her mate in a long-running saga of failed attempts to produce a surviving cub, was in a separate enclosure at the time. Zoo officials said they do not expect him to grieve because pandas are naturally solitary animals. They do not plan to alter his routine, including 11 a.m. and 3 p.m. feedings... ...No commemoration is planned, but the zoo probably will display cards -- no flowers, please -- in the panda compound, Morgan said. |
 This image is Bai Yun, a future Dead Panda. The reason this image is here is to show that they all look the same. Would you have known the difference if the caption had said this image was of either Ling Ling or Hsing Hsing? |
Ling-Ling, whose name means "darling little girl" in Chinese, weighed 240 pounds and measured slightly less than six feet from head to toe. She quickly was dubbed the extroverted half of the panda pair, which had never met until they arrived -- under armed guard -- as a gift from the people of China...
...The annual wait for her to produce a cub became something of a Washington ritual: first the measurement of hormone levels, then exultation, then disappointment. All was chronicled by cameras and watched around the clock by scores of volunteers brought in at the first sign of possible pregnancy.
Zoo officials first attempted to mate the pair in 1976, then tried artificial insemination and finally imported a male panda from London to do what Hsing-Hsing apparently could not. But Ling-Ling's encounter with the English outsider degenerated into a fight, and the project was abandoned.
After a rocky courtship in which he seemed inept and she seemed indifferent, Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing began mating in 1983. Ling-Ling had not given birth since 1989 and did not go into heat this year. Increasingly in her later years, she frolicked less and slept more...
...Scientists at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History would like to study Ling-Ling's body parts for a research project, but zoo officials have not decided what to do with her body, Morgan said...
© Copyright 1992 The Washington Post Company
Appreciation: A Little
Bit of Us All Lived on the Panda's Side of the Cage
By Elizabeth Kastor
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, December 31, 1992; Page C01
She was, in her way, the ultimate baby boomer. The biological clock ticking away. The high-tech fertility tests. The videotaped births. The drive to achieve.
Ling-Ling. Ling-Ling. Was it the pressure that did you in?
Again and again, her most private panda moments splayed across the newspaper pages and television screens. The pregnancies that turned out to be nothing more than hormonal glitches. Maybe she didn't even like Hsing-Hsing. Did anyone think to ask if sparks flew? Did anyone even ask her if she wanted a baby? No, we all assumed she was the Ultimate Mom, thwarted by nature. She wouldn't have left her kids behind and gone to Acapulco for Christmas vacation!
But perhaps she was more of an independent sort, a loner, a career-panda pressured by society and zookeepers to conform. Maybe she would have been happy with nieces and nephews.
Now we'll never know. She died suddenly yesterday, at age 23.
Over the years, Ling-Ling became more than just an Ailuropoda melanoleuca (they're not really bears). She was the screen upon which a baby-crazed generation projected its reproductive anxieties. Maybe the two needed some time away from each other. Maybe she should take a lover. (They brought in a panda from London, but no go.)
Wait a minute -- you say she was just a panda, not a yuppie? You say this was all instinct operating, not some complex emotional life? You say we anthropomorphized Ling-Ling, denied her her pandahood?...
...Now there will be only Hsing-Hsing (who must have suffered from performance anxiety of a sort none of us can imagine, but that's another story). There had been talk of sending him off to meet another panda on a sort of zoological blind date. But he's aging too. Perhaps it's time to say it was not meant to be, to hum a few bars of "As Times Goes By" and let the big guy grow old in peace.
© Copyright 1992 The Washington Post Company