A frantic hunt for a lioness on the loose that prompted many police officers, helicopters, drones, and fearful citizens has come to an unexpected end as Michael Grubert, the mayor of Kleinmachnow, where the lioness was sighted, declared that it was nothing but a wild boar. This leaves people scratching their heads in confusion: “A wild boar doesn’t really look like a lion.”
This wild story begins as two men sighted and captured a video of what seemed to be a lion chasing a wild boar. They reported it to the police shortly after. The search began, and its scale quickly escalated. Soon enough, officials had dispatched more than 100 police officers armed with riot gear, thermal imaging cameras, and at least one armored vehicle, all searching for the supposed lioness. To determine where the animal came from, the police called the owners of a local circus at 2 a.m. “They asked if we were missing a lion,” said Dinara Rogall, who helps run Circus Rogall in Teltow.
Scared
Warnings were all over social media and local news. They urged citizens to stay inside and cancel any outdoor events. “The atmosphere was quite tense,” Uda Bastians, a resident of Kleinmachnow, said in an interview. “There weren’t many people in the street, and the people you met, everyone was a bit afraid.” Ms. Bastians said that on the first day of the search, amid a constant hum of helicopters flying overhead, she decided not to take her dog out for walks, and instead exercised him in the garden. “Then the longer the search took, the less everyone cared,” she said. “Everyone was still saying, ‘OK, we don’t go into the woods and don’t let our dogs run free.’ But you can’t stay in your garden for two days.”
Everything for Nothing
The decision to call off the search was made after a resident called the police on Friday morning, reporting that they had seen the lion. The police flew a drone over the area and sent in a team of 30 officers equipped with heat-imaging cameras. They found nothing except a family of wild boars. The announcement that it had been a false alarm, Ms. Bastians said, came as a “huge surprise.” “A wild boar doesn’t really look like a lion, and we have a lot of wild boars,” she said. “Everyone has seen wild boars, and we all know lions from boars.”
Heribert Hofer, a professor of Wildlife Sciences and the director of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, an internationally renowned German research institute, said that the police in Berlin and Brandenburg were “not naïve” and were accustomed to dealing with both “hoaxes and inadvertent hoaxes.” “There are reports every year of crocodiles turning up in the lakes where people go swimming, and in the end, they usually turn out to be geese or large ducks that people don’t recognize in strange light conditions,” he said. “But they also know that people have pets, and particularly during Covid times, people have acquired pets — sometimes strange tropical creatures, and sometimes dangerous creatures — and quite a few of them have released them again.” “I can see some of the reasons for confusion,” he said, as the boar does have some features of the ferocious wildcat. Speaking at the news conference on Friday, Mr. Grubert, the Kleinmachnow mayor, implored reporters to consider the risks that could have arisen from not taking the reports seriously. “Imagine if it had been the other way around,” he said.around,” he said.
This wild story begins as two men sighted and captured a video of what seemed to be a lion chasing a wild boar. They reported it to the police shortly after. The search began, and its scale quickly escalated. Soon enough, officials had dispatched more than 100 police officers armed with riot gear, thermal imaging cameras, and at least one armored vehicle, all searching for the supposed lioness. To determine where the animal came from, the police called the owners of a local circus at 2 a.m. “They asked if we were missing a lion,” said Dinara Rogall, who helps run Circus Rogall in Teltow.
Scared
Warnings were all over social media and local news. They urged citizens to stay inside and cancel any outdoor events. “The atmosphere was quite tense,” Uda Bastians, a resident of Kleinmachnow, said in an interview. “There weren’t many people in the street, and the people you met, everyone was a bit afraid.” Ms. Bastians said that on the first day of the search, amid a constant hum of helicopters flying overhead, she decided not to take her dog out for walks, and instead exercised him in the garden. “Then the longer the search took, the less everyone cared,” she said. “Everyone was still saying, ‘OK, we don’t go into the woods and don’t let our dogs run free.’ But you can’t stay in your garden for two days.”
Everything for Nothing
The decision to call off the search was made after a resident called the police on Friday morning, reporting that they had seen the lion. The police flew a drone over the area and sent in a team of 30 officers equipped with heat-imaging cameras. They found nothing except a family of wild boars. The announcement that it had been a false alarm, Ms. Bastians said, came as a “huge surprise.” “A wild boar doesn’t really look like a lion, and we have a lot of wild boars,” she said. “Everyone has seen wild boars, and we all know lions from boars.”
Heribert Hofer, a professor of Wildlife Sciences and the director of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research, an internationally renowned German research institute, said that the police in Berlin and Brandenburg were “not naïve” and were accustomed to dealing with both “hoaxes and inadvertent hoaxes.” “There are reports every year of crocodiles turning up in the lakes where people go swimming, and in the end, they usually turn out to be geese or large ducks that people don’t recognize in strange light conditions,” he said. “But they also know that people have pets, and particularly during Covid times, people have acquired pets — sometimes strange tropical creatures, and sometimes dangerous creatures — and quite a few of them have released them again.” “I can see some of the reasons for confusion,” he said, as the boar does have some features of the ferocious wildcat. Speaking at the news conference on Friday, Mr. Grubert, the Kleinmachnow mayor, implored reporters to consider the risks that could have arisen from not taking the reports seriously. “Imagine if it had been the other way around,” he said.around,” he said.
