Believe it or not, a lot of animals currently residing in zoos across the world aren’t the biggest fans of living their lives in captivity. We don’t know if they’re showing the animals movies before they got sleep at night, but in some cases they’re pulling off elaborate Shawshank redemption style breakouts into glorious freedom. Here are the greatest animal zoo escapes in history.
Monkeys are great with tools, especially this particular bunch
You’ve probably seen footage of Capuchin monkeys using stones as tools in their day to lives to gather food, crack nuts and generally make their lives a little more manageable. At a zoo in Brazil, zoo keepers discovered that that all 8 Capuchin monkeys had escaped by using stones to smash the lock keeping them between captivity and freedom. 4 of the monkeys were re-captured, but the remaining half got to venture back out in the Brazilian jungle and enjoy their natural habitat.
A racoon embarked on a Shawkshank Redemption escape
Back in 2015, heavy rain hit a zoo in Somerset, England and gave a fearless raccoon the perfect opportunity to forge a daring escape. A female named Missy waited for the usually hardened soil around her enclosure’s perimeter to soften from the rain and seized her moment. She dug a hole that was large enough to crawl through and escape while nobody was taking any notice and disappeared. Alas, she couldn’t have known what to do with all that free time after being found in an unused enclosure at the zoo five weeks later.
Chuva The Macaw hitches a lift
Staff at Vancouver Zoo’s Parrot Gardens believed they’d done everything possible to stop birds from escaping by clipping their wings. But they didn’t take into account the sneaky efforts of one particular animal. in 2009, Chuva the macaw managed to sneak out of his enclosure without being detected and got over a wall and out into the car park. After three days of frantic searching, a family discovered Chuva hiding out in their Range Rover’s engine cabinet. Amazingly, the bird had made it 20 miles away from the zoo. Impressive stuff!
A wild tiger tried out zoo life but decided it wasn’t for him
What started out as the opposite of escape ended up becoming an hilarious evacuation of a zoo in India. A young wild tiger strolled onto the grounds of a big cat facility in search of some companionship with their captive tigress. Staff allowed him to stay, and for a few weeks he enjoyed captive life without all the stresses of wild life, eating food prepared for him and taking a few lovely naps in the shade.
But, the call of the wild was too strong and he ended up scaling a 20-feet security before returning to the forest that he’d emerged from. A security camera had been there to capture the whole incredible event, but he obviously wasn’t a fan of paparazzi as he sliced all the cables with his claws before leaving.
An Orangutan broke out three times and then did something amazing
In the mid 80’s, a bornean orangutan called Ken Allen gained notoriety for regularly breaking out of the San Diego zoo, a facility considered impossible to escape from. In the summer of 1985, Ken Allen broke out of his cage on three separate occasions and preceded to move casually around the zoo without really bothering anybody. What was truly incredible, though, was what he did for his fellow orangutans. He made sure they were paying attention and then demonstrated how they could escape as well, using a tree branch like a crowbar to pop open the gates to their enclosures. What was great is that he never bothered to complete his escapes, but probably just enjoyed casually messing with the zoo-keepers and impressing his primate pals.
