REAL LIFE NEWS: THE GREAT BABOON ESCAPE
by Hazed
A team of baboons showed amazing ingenuity when they worked together to enact a daring escape from a research facility.
The baboons were housed at a biomedical research institute in Texas, where almost 1,100 animals were kept. Some of them got to taste freedom outside of the prison walls.
Their cunning escape plan involved using a 55-gallon blue barrel, which had been given to the baboons as an ‘enrichment item’, designed to encourage their foraging instincts and behaviour by releasing food when it is rolled around.
Somehow, during the rolling around, the barrel fetched up against the enclosure’s wall and got stood up on its end. The four escapees were then able to climb onto the barrel and jump over the wall. One got cold feet and voluntarily returned to the enclosure, but three completed their intrepid escape. They were then easily able to get through the perimeter fence around the institute and make it to local roads. Motorists and onlookers were startled, to say the least.
“They are very smart animals,” TBRI spokesperson Lisa Cruz said. “It’s their natural inclination to get to the next highest spot to climb.”
After 20 minutes at large, the researchers managed to round up the three baboon absconders. They were unhurt by their escapade.
I wonder if they will now teach the other baboons how to use the blue barrels to escape.
