The huge amounts spent on the pandas could have saved Gorgie Farm - Susan Dalgety

So farewell Yang Guang and Tian Tian, the famous giant pandas. After a ten-year residency at Edinburgh Zoo, the cuddly pair are set to fly home to China later in the year.

Male panda Yang Guang at Edinburgh Zoo. The huge amount of money spent on the pandas could have saved Gorgie Farm several times over, writes Susan Dalgety.

They did not come cheap. Their annual contract cost the zoo £750,000, which the Royal Zoological Society seemed content to pay, given the pandas’ pulling power.

I saw them a couple of times early in their career, but I am afraid I was never that impressed. They are asleep much of the time and when one of them eventually lumbered to its feet, it looked utterly bored.

I much prefer Love Gorgie Farm to Edinburgh Zoo, and I am devastated by the news of its impending closure. Its current owners, the charity Love Learning, say they can’t afford to keep the farm open. It has an annual deficit of £150,000 and hasn’t received any funds from the City Council since 2020.

The farm is hardly on the scale of the zoo. Its most exotic animals are the cuddly alpacas, Truffles, Kiwi and Whiteley. My favourite is Arran the Boer goat and not just because it shares its name with our grandson (and looks like him according to his cousin).

The farm has been threatened with closure before. It went into liquidation in 2019, before being rescued by Love Learning, but the loss of its council funding on top of rising energy costs have made the current operation unsustainable.

Council leader Cammy Day, while sympathetic, hasn’t yet offered any hard cash. Local MSP Miles Briggs has called for cross-party council talks to hammer out a rescue deal, and has written to the acting Finance Secretary, John Swinney, to ask for emergency funding to keep the farm open while a long term solution is found. I hope his plea succeeds.

I can’t help thinking about the £7.5 million Edinburgh Zoo spent over the last decade for two sleepy pandas. Imagine the difference an investment even half that size would have made to the city farm.

Arran the goat may not have the same glamorous appeal as Tian Tian the giant panda, but to me and thousands of local children, he’s a superstar.