Japanese Zoo Drill - Escaped Rhino!

Japan is an extremely earthquake prone country, and a scenario where dangerous animals escape into downtown Tokyo isn't that far fetched (remember the confused Japanese macaque). Preparing for such an eventuality, staff at the Ueno Zoo hold regular drills to hone their pissed-off animal catching skills, and short of actually releasing rhinoceroses into the park the only way to do this is have people dress up like them.



Unrelated, but also interesting, from the Ueno Zoo's Wikipedia entry:

"Ueno Zoo's saddest time came during World War II. The Japanese Army ordered that all "wild and dangerous animals" at the zoo be killed, claiming that bombs could hit the zoo and escaping wild animals would wreak havoc in the streets of Tokyo. Requests by the staff at the zoo for a reprieve, or to evacuate the animals elsewhere, were refused. Ueno Zoo's three elephants at the time, John, Tonky, and Wanly (or Wang Lee) were too clever to eat the poisoned food, and thus were slowly starved to death. The fate of Ueno's animals, particularly the elephants, has often been used in Japan as an example of the evils of war."

There's also a scene in Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle where Japanese soldiers in Nanking kill all the animals in a zoo, and I suspect Europe has similar stories. War sucks!

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Crocodiles vs. Japanese soldiers

On a darker note: Allied Reptiles

In February 1945, the British 14th Army had surrounded a mass of fleeing Japanese in a mangrove swamp in southern Burma. In the swamp were thousands of saltwater crocodiles, averaging 15 feet long, but the Japanese refused to surrender. The crisis came on the night of Feb. 19:

That night was the most horrible that any member of the [marine launch] crews ever experienced. The scattered rifle shots in the pitch black swamp punctured by the screams of wounded men crushed in the jaws of huge reptiles, and the blurred worrying sound of spinning crocodiles made a cacophony of hell that has rarely been duplicated on earth. At dawn the vultures arrived to clean up what the crocodiles had left. … Of about 1,000 Japanese soldiers that entered the swamps of Ramree, only about 20 were found alive.

That's the account of naturalist Bruce Wright. If it's accurate, this would be the worst crocodile attack — and indeed one of the deadliest animal attacks — in recorded history.

War is hell, but crocodiles are worse. Incidentally, saltwater crocodiles are the largest and meanest of all reptiles, growing up to eighteen feet long and weighing over a ton.

Again from Futility Closet.

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