New York – The hunt for Novaan eleven-pound spotted leopard, escaped from the zoo of Dallas, Texas, ended after a day of urban safari that kept the police, zoological guards and the media apprehensive. But it’s not the classic case of voluntary escape like the ones that animated the cartoon sagas Hollywood. According to zoo officials, someone deliberately cut the fence to allow the leopard to escape.
The alarm and the search
The alarm was raised early in the morning when zoo workers noticed that there was a hole in the fence. Inside the enclosure, which reproduces a wild environment, there were two felines until the day before: Novafour year old leopard, and his sister, Luna. The first was gone, the second remained in place. From that moment began a frantic leopard hunt, which saw the zoo guards, the police and the special agents of the Swat, those that are generally employed in terrorist operations or when there is a criminal hunt. The zoo has been closed. The area was flown over by drones. Hundreds of trees were checked, as leopards love to climb and hide in the branches. The idea of suddenly finding yourself in a savannah, at the risk of being attacked by a feline, has sown apprehension among the inhabitants of the area, but also unleashed fans of Nova, who began to cheer for his escape to be successful. The forty-hectare park is located five kilometers from downtown Dallas. It is the oldest zoo in Texas and is operated by a non-profit that cares for two thousand animals representing more than four hundred species. The police had issued via social a alert, calling the situation “very serious”. Nova could have remained inside the park area, but also exited, heading towards the center of the city. That was the hypothesis that most worried the police. The zoo had tried to reassure, saying that Nova “wasn’t dangerous”, but being faced with a feline on the street or in the garden is not a situation that induces calm.
It’s not the first case
It is not the first time from the zoo of Dallas animals run away. In 2004, a 154-kilogram gorilla named Jabari had escaped, the protagonist of an escape that lasted forty minutes and was marked by dramatic moments: three people were injured. Jabari had been killed by the police. With the leopard there was no need to shoot. The feline had hidden itself on an embankment, above a shed, not far from where he had fled. He wasn’t hurt. In the afternoon, four managed to block him and put him in a sack, to take him back to the pen. But the case is not over. The images of the surveillance cameras will be analyzed to try to understand who may have approached the fence and cut it.