27 stories
Marwell Zoo in Hampshire welcomed two capybaras on Monday. By Tuesday, both had escaped. One was recovered quickly — the other, Samba, decided she had better things to do and was last spotted in a nearby village. The zoo is still looking. Samba is not.
A Vermont raccoon with a peanut butter jar wedged firmly over its head made a bad situation worse by climbing 25 feet up a tree, forcing the local fire department to deploy a ladder and a snare to resolve what is generously being called a rescue operation. The raccoon survived with its dignity only partially intact.
Residents near a Hindu temple in Himachal Pradesh, India, wandered up to what they assumed was a tangle of tree roots — until someone lobbed a stone at it and the whole mass erupted into five or six enormous pythons heading in every direction. The forest department has been notified, which feels like closing the stable door after the horse-sized snakes have bolted.
A real live brushtail possum infiltrated Hobart Airport's gift shop and spent quality time nestled among the plush toy animals, looking, by all accounts, extremely comfortable. Staff discovered it sitting in the native plush section. Things got chaotic when it decided to take a stroll into the departure lounge and passengers lost their collective minds trying to film it.
New York's Staten Island Railway had a fowl afternoon on March 18th, when wild turkeys brought the line to a halt twice within ninety minutes — once near Old Town station, once near St. George terminal. Each time, the MTA's solution was to blast the train horn repeatedly until the birds decided they were done. It worked both times, which is either reassuring or mildly embarrassing, depending on who you ask.
A Shih Tzu mix was found perched, inexplicably, on top of a SEPTA elevated train track support pillar in West Philadelphia. Nobody knows how she got up there. Animal protection officers deployed a cherry picker to get her down. She was fine. She has been named Dottie. She is not talking.
KTLA reporter Erin Myers was live on air in Monrovia, California, reporting on local bear encounters when a bear wandered into the camera frame behind her. This was the second time a bear has crashed one of her broadcasts. The bear, to no one's surprise, was not available for comment.
A Shenzhen arcade thought it would be a fun twist to fill a claw machine with live hamsters instead of plush toys — and shockingly, the internet had thoughts. When police arrived, they discovered there's literally no law in Shenzhen against it, so the arcade simply swapped the hamsters for live fish and turtles, apparently treating the whole affair as a product refresh.
A Virginia liquor store got a very unexpected Black Friday visitor: a raccoon that crashed through the ceiling, toured the bottom shelf, sampled the moonshine, the peanut butter whiskey, the scotch, and the eggnog, then passed out in the bathroom between the toilet and the bin. Animal control gave it a few hours to sleep it off before releasing it back into the wild, presumably without a receipt.
A stray kitten arrived at the Palm Springs Animal Shelter looking less like a cat and more like a stress ball someone had squeezed too hard — air trapped under her skin had puffed her out to almost comical proportions. The fix was a needle and a steady hand, and now Zoe the "Puff Kitty" is two pounds of proof that sometimes medicine is just... letting the air out.
When a line of Kentucky storms dismantled her fence and shelter last Sunday, Mystery the emu took the opportunity to go walkabout across Hardin County. Authorities asked residents not to chase her — because a frightened emu is, if anything, harder to deal with than a calm one — and by Monday she was safely back home, the exact circumstances of her return predictably unexplained.
Mystery solved: the great hair tie vanishing act has a culprit, and her name is Midnite. A Florida rescue shelter took in the 6-year-old black cat after her owner surrendered her for euthanasia over a gut-wrenching intestinal blockage — and when surgeons went in, they found 26 hair ties making themselves at home in her stomach. She's recovering well, which is more than can be said for anyone's ponytail situation.
A lab mix spent several agonising days wandering the Alabama countryside completely blind, because a bucket was stuck over his head — and photos of the walking disaster went viral on Facebook before anyone could catch him. Local residents rallied, animal trapper Kaleb Estill helped run him down, and a man named Eric Bowman arrived with a pair of snips to deliver the most satisfying rescue trim in recent memory. The dog, now named Buck, had one piece of good luck throughout the whole ordeal: a loyal Belgian Malinois who refused to leave his side for a single moment.
Farmers in Firozpur village, Uttar Pradesh, are suiting up in full bear costumes every morning to patrol their fields and scare off a gang of over 100 crop-raiding monkeys. It is working — sort of. The monkeys just go bother someone else.
Two tiny creatures — the very first elephant shrew pups ever born in Britain — have arrived at Hertfordshire Zoo, and each one weighs roughly the same as a single AA battery. The babies, nicknamed the Snootlets, were born so quietly that keepers only found out by reviewing the overnight CCTV footage the next morning. Oh, and despite the name, elephant shrews are actually more closely related to elephants than to shrews — a fact that somehow makes them even more confusing.
A Canadian tourist got the bright idea to steal a 27-year-old flamingo named Peachy from the Flamingo Las Vegas's wildlife habitat at 5 a.m., tuck her under his jacket, and take her up to his hotel room on the 14th floor. His defence? He was drunk, and he's a farm boy who knows how to fix wings. Peachy survived. He did not escape Vegas.
A livestock hauler carrying 110 cows overturned near Winchester, Virginia, and 40 of them immediately dispersed into the night — some toward Interstate 81, others into the woods. The road was shut down for nearly seven hours while emergency crews and animal control staged what can only be described as a very large, very bovine manhunt.
An escaped bull turned up at Eudora High School in Kansas last Thursday, treating the athletic fields like a personal exercise yard before police and firefighters managed to coax it back into a trailer. Officers noted that 'livestock wrangling' wasn't in the academy curriculum — but teamwork prevailed, and the bull was duly charged with a 'moo-ving violation.'
Euphrates is nine months old, weighs 168 pounds, stands six feet tall on her hind legs, and belongs to a new breed deliberately engineered to resurrect an ancient Mesopotamian war dog that went extinct around 5,000 BC. Her owner in Salt Lake City has contacted Guinness World Records after failing to find any other puppy on earth that comes close to her size. She is reportedly affectionate, but can take down a grown man with a careless tail wag.
Animal control officers in Wichita Falls, Texas got more than they bargained for when they were called to assist police with an exotic animal violation — what they found was a Siamese spitting cobra coiled in a container, very much alive. For the shelter's animal care supervisor, it was a first in nine years on the job. The cobra has since been relocated to a licensed serpentarium, where it will join 200 of its scaly colleagues after a 90-day quarantine.
A badger snuck into a California high school and made itself comfortable in a storage closet, triggering a multi-agency wildlife operation to get it out. Thanks to California's strict regulations around animal capture and relocation, the eviction required a state biologist — not just a broom. The badger was safely removed; questions about how it got in remain unanswered.
Merlin the pig has 1.1 million Instagram followers and now holds an official Guinness World Record to prove it. The four-year-old California resident communicates with his owner via 30+ programmed buttons around the house — and apparently, the internet finds this irresistible.
A red fox somehow survived a transatlantic voyage from Southampton, England to New York as a stowaway aboard a cargo ship — and is now living at the Bronx Zoo while customs officials try to figure out how this happened. The approximately 2-year-old male seems unbothered by the whole ordeal, which is more than you can say for the customs officers who found him.
A 69-year-old hiker in Japan's Iwate Prefecture wandered off trail in snowy conditions, stepped into a hidden hole, and discovered it was occupied by a hibernating bear — which responded to the intrusion by biting his leg. The bear then followed him out of the hole and attempted to attack his companion before being chased off with hiking poles. Online commenters, with unusual unanimity, sided with the bear.
Two marsupial species — known only from fossils and presumed extinct for 6,000 years — have been found very much alive in the rainforests of West Papua, including one with a freakishly elongated finger and another so sacred that local Indigenous elders refuse to say its name aloud. Scientists made the discovery by working with clan communities who'd known about these animals all along. The animals, for their part, had no idea they were supposed to be extinct.
In a move that surprised absolutely no one at an antique store in East Durham, New York, an eastern screech owl decided a shelf next to a chicken-shaped cookie jar was the perfect napping spot. The tiny bird was found completely conked out among the vintage trinkets, apparently unbothered by the whole shopping situation happening around it. Wildlife officials from the New York Department of Environmental Conservation had to be called in to evict what is objectively the world's most nonchalant trespasser.
In a move that surprised absolutely no one who has spent any time in Florida, a large yellow pet python decided a car dashboard was a more desirable home than its enclosure and wedged itself so thoroughly inside the vehicle that its owner had to call firefighters for help. The Coral Springs Fire Department showed up to perform what is apparently now a standard Florida extraction: snake, from dashboard, alive. The python was eventually recovered; the car presumably needs therapy.