After five days of freedom roaming the wilds and back gardens of the Cairngorms, Honshu the Japanese macaque was back with his keepers at the Highland Wildlife Park on Friday, recovering from the tranquilliser dart that finally brought his escapade to an end.
Sadly for the fugitive, there was no more contraband bird food, let alone Yorkshire pudding, the back-garden treat that finally led to his recapture. Instead, a spokesperson for the Royal Zoological Society of Scotland said, the monkey was back on his normal fare of primate pellets, vegetables and leaves, and none the worse for his adventure.
Honshu’s bold escape, after he scaled the perimeter fence of his enclosure last Sunday, may have brought him brief global celebrity, but while Biaza, the British and Irish Association of Zoos and Aquariums, says incidents like this are “very rare”, zoo escapes are perhaps not quite as unusual as one might expect.
Even while the world’s media were focused on finding Honshu, for instance, zoo authorities at the opposite end of Britain have been hunting their own missing animal. Dartmoor zoo in Devon confirmed two weeks ago that Malu, a Palawan binturong – a threatened subspecies related to the civet – was missing from his enclosure, amid reports that he had not been seen since Christmas. While the nocturnal animal is not dangerous, according to the zoo, visitors have been advised not to approach him.
Earlier in January, a rainbow lorikeet escaped its aviary at Colchester zoo in Essex by hitching a ride on a member of the public as they left the walk-through enclosure; experts have been debating whether it could survive in the wild.
Last year in the UK there were escapes of a red panda from Newquay zoo in Cornwall in May (later recaptured at a greengrocer’s after being spotted “ambling” down a street); a 1.2-metre tegu lizard from a Cumbrian petting zoo in June (the public were warned it “can run like a T Rex”), and a pelican from Blackpool zoo in August (blown away after being spooked by a group of seagulls).
That same month, an unidentified monkey fled its enclosure in Paignton zoo in Devon (to be later found among the rhinos after visitors to the zoo were put in lockdown), while in September three yellow parrots escaped from the Wild zoological park in the West Midlands (blown out of the grounds by a strong gust of wind).
Some animal welfare campaigners suggest there may be many more. “Zoos only have to announce or declare an animal has escaped to the local licensing authority as the animal leaves the perimeter of the zoo,” said Chris Lewis, the captivity research officer at the Born Free Foundation. An animal that gets out of its enclosure but stays within the zoo’s confines need only be recorded internally, he said. “So the number of escapes that actually occur is probably much higher than [we know about].”
More serious incidents are not an everyday occurrence, but are far from unknown. Incidents in recent years have included the lynx that escaped Borth zoo in west Wales in 2017 and was later shot dead in a caravan park, and the snow leopard that got out of Dudley zoo the following year, which suffered the same fate. Two brown bears were shot dead at Whipsnade zoo in 2021 after using a fallen tree to get into the neighbouring boar enclosure. Most seriously, keeper Sarah McClay was mauled to death by a Sumatran tiger at a Cumbrian animal park in 2013.
That zoo was later heavily fined, and Biaza’s chief executive, Jo Judge, insists that British zoos conform to some of the highest standards in the world and prepare very carefully for the chance escape of an animal.
“All [institutions] that have a zoo licence are legally required to have procedures in place to ensure that they prevent escapes where possible, and that they are prepared for dealing with escapes, in those very rare occasions if they do happen,” she said. The procedures included drills four times a year training for escapes of different types of species. “Obviously, it would be very different if a fish escaped from a tank, as opposed to the macaque in this instance, and they have to be prepared for all eventualities.”
Depending on the kinds of species they keep, zoos will have staff who are trained in firing tranquilliser darts, and possibly also in firearms, Judge said. “If they have an animal that could be a danger to life, then it’s a legal requirement that they have firearms on site, and that they have people trained to use them.
“So although it’s really rare, everyone takes it incredibly seriously.”
Regardless of the seriousness of the event, however, every zoo escape represents a failure of some kind, and Samantha Ward, associate professor of zoo animal welfare at Nottingham Trent University, said there would be lessons to be learned from this week’s events.
“One of the biggest aspects at the moment for zoo design is incorporating interaction between humans and animals. These days, we’re trying to improve and increase the [ways] that people can feel connected to the animals. This means that you might reduce the amount of fencing or you will have different viewpoints, which then allow a different kind of interaction with the animals within the enclosures.
“And I think sometimes it might be that the focus on what the visitors need is maybe [placed] higher than the safety or the security side of things.”
As well as enclosure design, there will be questions about the social dynamics in the animal’s enclosure, and whether it has been pushed out from the group; in Honshu’s case, according to the animal park, he will be gradually introduced to the other sub-adult males before being reintroduced to the whole group.
Captivity may have called for Honshu the macaque, but sometimes an animal does not only flee a zoo, but thrives. By coincidence, Friday marked the anniversary of the escape from Central Park zoo in New York of Flaco the Eurasian eagle owl.
For more than a week after vandals first cut a hole in his enclosure and he escaped, local birders and zoo authorities chased the huge owl around Manhattan, attempting to lure him back. Eventually, however, they realised he had taught himself to hunt for rats, and decided to leave him to it.
A year on, Flaco may well be the only Eurasian eagle owl living in the wild in the Americas, but he’s doing just fine – and occasionally popping up on apartment windowsills to peer at the humans within.
