Fun_People Archive
22 Oct
Animals in the News - 8/98

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From: Peter Langston <psl>
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 98 14:32:43 -0700
To: Fun_People
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Subject: Animals in the News - 8/98

X-Lib-of-Cong-ISSN: 1098-7649
Forwarded-by: <CrombieVA@aol.com>
From: www.animalnetwork.com/petindustry/ppn/newsline/1998/aug/new14.htm

    A woman in San Francisco's Mission District called the Animal Care and
Control Center Aug. 2 to complain that an iguana was "staring" at her cat.
The officer who responded to the call discovered the lizard was actually a
3 1/2-foot-long crocodile. Capt. Vicky Guldbech said a man called the center
claiming to be the owner of the 6-year-old crocodile, named Ernest. The man
said Ernest disappeared a few weeks ago while the man was moving. The man
refused to give his name and has not collected the animal because owning a
crocodile is illegal, punishable by up to six months in jail...
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    Walking pet lions around the neighborhood can be risky. Two lions, a
male and female, became agitated while being walked in the southern Spanish
town of Ceuta and mauled four women passersby, injuring three of them
critically, a local official said. A government statement said the lions,
which are one and two years old respectively, were being kept illegally in
dog houses without proper documentation and would be taken to separate zoos.
It did not say what would happen to the unidentified man who was walking
them...
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    A pet squirrel grounded a Cyprus Airways jetliner for a day as it played
hide-and-seek with engineers and airline crew trying to catch it, airline
executives said in late July. The squirrel was smuggled on a Cyprus Airways
flight from Athens to Cyprus by a young passenger who had it concealed in
a bag. "The boy must have known what he had done was wrong because he only
let it out of the bag when he went to the toilet. That is when it escaped
and we spent the next 24 hours looking for it," said airline spokesman
Tassos Angeli.  Fearing it would chew through cables or cause other damage
the airline briefly contemplated gassing the plane to flush the playful pet
out but finally fell back on the more conventional method of coaxing it with
food. It worked. But not before costing the airline some 50,000 pounds
($95,250) from rescheduled or delayed flights. Engineers have temporarily
adopted the squirrel until its owner shows up. "We have told the boy to come
forward and claim his pet. We promise we won't be angry," Angeli said...

© 1998 Peter Langston