5 of the Most Inspiring Animal Escapes
Everyone — okay, almost everyone — likes to house a good cheeseburger before swinging by the zoo. As long as you don’t think about the horror involved in the meatpacking industry and keeping living beings imprisoned as entertainment, they’re tasty and/or cute. Not all animals are content to accept their lot, though, reminding us that the indomitable human spirit can live inside a platypus, too.
Penelope the Platypus
In 1947, Penelope was brought to the Bronx Zoo with another platypus, Cecil. Only one other pair had ever mated in captivity, so zookeepers enthusiastically encouraged them to pound down, but Penelope wasn’t a fan of Cecil’s moves, which we can’t ethically describe without a trigger warning. After five years of this, she hatched a plan. She appeared to warm to Cecil and then began behaving as an expectant mother, essentially faking a pregnancy. This got everyone off her back for a good long while, but once it became clear no litter of platy (puppies?) was forthcoming, she just bounced outta there, never to be seen again. Remember her this International Women’s Day.
Ken Allen
“Ken Allen” sounds like the middlingest of stand-up comedians, but he was actually much more entertaining. He was an orangutan at the San Diego Zoo who, in 1985, began making monthly excursions around the grounds to look at the other animals after calmly disassembling the gates of his exhibit. For more than a year, zookeepers couldn’t figure out how he was doing it, and in the meantime, he’d roped the other orangutans into his shenanigans, forming an all-out orangutan revolt (but a very friendly one). They eventually hired expert rock-climbers “to find every finger-, toe- and foothold within the enclosure.” They had to spend $40,000 to fix them, but “in our hearts, we know your dream is finally coming true,” according to the folk song written about him.
Terence the Turkey
Maybe consider a ham this holiday season, because in 2001, a turkey in England named Terence was so opposed to becoming someone’s Christmas dinner that he escaped his farm and walked three miles to a bird sanctuary. “I cannot imagine why he homed in on the sanctuary,” the owner said. “He must have got lost and followed the friendly sounds from all the other birds." That, or he looked into his heart for divine guidance. Come on, guys. This is a Pixar movie.
Emily the Cow
Speaking of divinity, a cow named Emily who escaped a Massachusetts slaughterhouse just before she was to be killed in 1995 became almost a religious figure. For 40 days, townspeople kept her fed while she was on the lam, until a family who ran an organization dedicated to “interfaith peace movements” bought her from her captors and brought her home on Christmas Eve. Despite the obvious Christian overtones, Emily became popular with the Hindu community. She even received blessings from a Hindu priest before her death, and clippings of her hair and traces of her blood were released into a sacred river in India. Our own funerals will almost certainly be nowhere near as solemn.
Cincinnati Freedom
In 2002, after another cow escaped a slaughterhouse by jumping over a six-foot fence and evaded both the police and the SPCA for 11 days in the Cincinnati winter, everyone pretty much decided she’d earned a stay of execution. The problem, then, was what to do with her. The Cincinnati Zoo refused to take her, due to “the possibility that she could not be safely contained.” They genuinely didn’t believe they could cage her. She ended up being bought by an artist who named her Cincinnati Freedom, was awarded the key to the city and lived out her golden years at an animal sanctuary with her BFF, Queenie, another escaped cow. We should all be so lucky.
