The Asa Zoological Park in Hiroshima, Japan, held what might be the cutest emergency drill ever this past Sunday. The zoo had a worker cosplay as a bear on the loose to simulate an animal escape. The faux ursine was successfully corralled by the large group of employees, who went through the motions of bringing it down with a tranquilizer gun.
The drill is apparently an annual tradition of the zoo, according to Japanese news outlet The Yomiuri Shimbun—one that’s performed in full view of the public. This time around, the scenario involved a male bear that had escaped from its cage via a tree that had fallen from a preceding earthquake. Despite the brown coloration of their costume, the disguised employee was reportedly supposed to represent one of the zoo’s Japanese black bears (Ursus thibetanus japonicus), a subspecies of the Asian black bear.
Once the fake bear started to rampage through the zoo, a group of around 20 employees and veterinarians carried out their containment plan. They used barricades, nets, and even a rake to pin the bear down. Then they pretended to tranquilize their co-worker, wrapped them in a net, and hauled them away in the back of a van, presumably to take them back to the break room. A short YouTube video of the bear’s escapades from Hiroshima News TSS can be seen here and below.
Bear zoo escapes aren’t an everyday threat, of course, but they do occasionally happen. Last February, for instance, a four-year-old Andean bear named Ben at the Saint Louis Zoo in Missouri escaped from its habitat, not once but twice, in a span of a month, though both escapes were short-lived. Ben was eventually moved to the Gladys Porter Zoo in Texas, where it’s hoped that the new environment (complete with a moat) will be more suitable for him.
While the Asa Zoological Park’s drill is all in good fun, real Japanese black bears are in dire straits. Deforestation and hunting have steadily dwindled their numbers over the years, with less than 10,000 members of the subspecies now estimated to be living in the wild currently. The smallest populations of these apex predators are in danger of being wiped out completely within the next twenty years.