This Tortoise Escape Artist Has Been Brought Home Once Again
This is Abuh’s second escape from Shibukawa Animal Park this summer.
If you have to escape from the same place twice, it probably means you’re not that great at it.
Still, we should give some credit to Abuh the tortoise, who has managed to evade her captors at Shibukawa Animal Park in Okayama, Japan twice already this summer. As Agence France-Presse reports, Abuh was returned to the zoo today after a two-week stint on the lam.
Giant tortoise that fled Japan zoo found just 140m away https://t.co/N0IswuQoyK
— Hasnoor Hussain (@hasnoor_hussain) August 16, 2017
Both times, Abuh has escaped using a tried and true method: high-tailing it slowly out the front door while everyone was distracted. Last time she got out, in late July, she was found walking down the highway less than 500 feet from the zoo. (At 121 pounds, she’s a little too big to hitchhike.)
Despite the length of this more recent escape, Abuh was again found close to home, this time hiding in some shrubbery. Her keepers, who offered a large reward for her return, are happy to have her back.
Although tortoises are no flamingos, they have historically shown a certain amount of escaping panache. Last July, a pet tortoise successfully evaded Los Angeles’s disastrous Sand Fire by getting out of his house and walking down the freeway.
In 2015, two elderly tortoises on opposite coasts broke out of their homes at the same time, perhaps to meet up. The year before that, a tortoise in Michigan may have even aided and abetted the escape of a fellow reptile, Carlos the alligator.
Eventually, one of these attempts is going to pay off—for Abuh or someone else. Slow and steady wins the race.
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