You never know what you're going to see on your way to work, but nobody expects a scene from "Jumanji."
Commuters in Atlanta late Thursday afternoon must have done a double-take when a zebra trotted by their cars on a crowded interstate.
Lima, a 12-year-old zebra, was training for the evening show of the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey circus when something spooked it. Lima somehow "wiggled through a fence," according to the Associated Press, and was off.
And the best quote about the incident, IMO:
"All of a sudden a freaking zebra comes running down the street like a car. Five or six police cars were in hot pursuit. And a bunch of officers on foot. But then I got scared, thinking ... what else is loose?" -- Daniel Nance to the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Lima was ultimately delivered to its owner, pretty freaked out, but otherwise unharmed.
Here's video from YouTube showing Lima on the highway just after being captured:
This got me wondering how frequently circus animals escape. Judging by how often it's happened just over the past year, it's not a rare thing.
Here are a few incidents.
-- On June 30, 2008, a giraffe with a travelling circus in The Netherlands kicked a hole in a fence and lead a merry parade of circus animals, including 15 camels, some llamas and a potbellied pig, around a residential neighborhood.
-- On Oct. 1, 2009, five llamas got loose from a circus in Dublin, Ireland, snarling traffic on a busy highway. They wandered out a gate that had been left open.
Escaped circus animals aren't always docile, and their stories don't always end up as cutely as Lima's did.
-- This is a sad one. On Apr. 19, 2009, two bears escaped from a circus in Kassel, Germany, and ended up in a busy intersection. Police went to round them up, one bear attacked a policeman, and the bear ended up dead.
Photo: Associated Press
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