ANIMALS ARE IN ZOOS SO HUMANS DON'T KILL THEM. MANY TRY TO ESCAPE THEIR PRISON.

8 times other animals wanted freedom as much as Inky the octopus.

SINCE HUMAN BEINGS TEND TO KILL AND OVERKILL JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING, MANY SPECIES OF ANIMALS WIND UP IN ZOOS FOR "PROTECTION". IT'S A HELL LIFE, ONE THAT ANY ANIMAL WOULD LOATHE. 

WHO HASN'T BEEN TO A ZOO AND NOTICED THE INCESSANT PACING, THE ANIMALS CHECKING, RECHECKING EVERY INCH OF THEIR ENCLOSURES FOR A WAY OUT.

SO, MANY TRY TO ESCAPE, RISKING THEIR LIVES TO BE FREE.

OTHERS ESCAPE TO AVOID SLAUGHTER AS 'FOOD ANIMALS'....

Two of nine American bison that escaped from Buzz Berg’s Stevenson, Md., farm run from police and volunteers on April 26, 2005, on a tennis court in Pikesville, Md. Police herded the buffalo into the courts before herding them into a trailer and returning them to the farm. (Steve Ruark/AP)
The bison had good reason not to go back: They were going to be meat.
The farmer’s nickname for them: “You’re next.”

ANOTHER SUCH CASE,
The bull from Queens     Just this month, a black-and-white Angus bull destined for slaughter decided to make a bid for freedom. He escaped from a livestock holding area and raced down a busy thoroughfare.
Trouble was, he was in Jamaica, Queens, where there’s neither a wide open horizon nor a dense forest good for concealing a one-ton body.
Still, the bull headed for the closest thing around to a pasture — the green lawns of the York College campus.

But police were on his tail. They lassoed him in after half an hour or so, the New York Times reported.

So liberation was not in the cards for this bull.
But neither was slaughter.
In what counts as the happiest ending he probably could have hoped for, the bull was picked up by comedian Jon Stewart and his wife, Tracey — who own an animal sanctuary in New Jersey — and transported to Upstate New York.


A RARE FEW MAKE THE GREAT ESCAPE AND NEVER LOOK BACK  ...  
INKY, THE OCTOPUS    
Three months ago, after more than a year in a New Zealand aquarium tank, Inky the octopus decided to pursue — or maybe accidentally ended up pursuing, according to one octopus expert — a life of freedom in the Pacific Ocean. It’s a big ocean, so he’s almost certainly gone for good.

[Octopus slips out of aquarium tank, crawls across floor, escapes down pipe to ocean]

Before Inky, however, many other captive animals have tried to make their own great escapes into more human-populated terrain, and a few have been successful. But most that fought the law found that the law won.

HONEY BADGER    
Stoffel the honey badger may be in an enclosure at a South African wildlife rehabilitation center, but he cannot be kept down. Just ask Brian Jones, his keeper, who told the BBC about his prison breaks. Stoffel can unlatch a gate, and he taught his female friend to do the same. He has dug holes to tunnel out from under the cement walls that pen him in. He has piled up rocks like a ladder to get over those walls; when returned to the enclosure, he propped up a rake, scaled up it and hopped over again.


FLAMINGO    
A mostly white flamingo known as No. 492 recognized its opportunity when zookeepers in Wichita failed to clip its wings on time. The bird did what birds do: spread those wings and flew the coop.

That was the summer of 2005, and the flamingo never came back. It has since been spotted in Wisconsin, Louisiana and Texas. It was last seen near Port Lavaca, Tex., by a birder who spotted the flamingo’s  zoo ID band. The zoo told Reuters that it never tried to round up the bird, which is about 20 years old and has been seen socializing with another flamingo known to have been raised in the Yucatan Peninsula.
“As soon as he had the chance, he flew out of here,” Scott Newland, the zoo’s bird curator, told Reuters.

GOLDEN EAGLE    
Goldie was a golden eagle who didn’t have a name until 1965 — when he made a break for it after a maintenance worker at the London Zoo left his cage open.

The bird left behind his partner, Regina, and went on a 12-day bachelor’s jaunt in the city. He mostly hung out in Regent’s Park, where fans cheered him on and law enforcement officers tried to capture him. So did a reporter, who used an Ethiopian bird pipe in a failed attempt to lure the eagle in. 

A zookeeper told the BBC that Goldie, as he came to be known during his escapade, would come back when hungry. Then he proved he knew how to hunt.

Eventually, though, Goldie was taken in by the promise of meat. A zookeeper captured the bird after luring him with a dead rabbit that was tied to a rope and placed near the zoo’s wild fowl sanctuary. Months later, he again escaped for four days, but that was the last time. He died two decades later, still in captivity.


Humboldt penguin No. 337 of Japan    
In 2012, this penguin is believed to have jumped onto a rock much taller than it, slipped through a gap in a fence and said sayonara to a Tokyo aquarium where it lived.

For 82 full days, the bird eluded capture attempts that involved the Japanese coast guard. It was filmed swimming in the Tokyo Bay.

Eventually, No. 337 was seized, hearty and hale, after being spotted swimming in a river five miles from the aquarium. According to the Guardian, the aquarium’s deputy director, Kazuhiro Sakamoto, said the penguin “looks like it’s been living quite happily in the middle of Tokyo Bay.”


Rusty, the red panda of DC     In the steamy summer of 2013, Rusty the red panda was a new kid in town, having come just weeks before from a children’s zoo in Nebraska. And he evidently wanted to explore the nation’s capital.
He slipped out of the Smithsonian National Zoo on a Monday morning and immediately became the talk of the town (and the subject of a question at a White House news conference).

But shortly after lunchtime, he’d been done in by Twitter: A family spotted him in Adam’s Morgan and tweeted his photo, then called the zoo. Zoo and Washington Humane Society personnel found him in a tree and nudged him with a pole into a safety net.
In January 2014, he was transferred to the Smithsonian’s Conservation Biology Institute in Front Royal, Va., so he could mate with a fellow local red panda, Shama.

“He’s a young … male, and we all know how young males like to test their boundaries,” zoo curator Brandie Smith said.

YEAH THEY WANT OUT, JUST AS WE ALL WOULD!    


The llamas of Arizona    
In 2015, two llamas bolted upon arrival at a therapy visit to a former llama rancher living at a retirement center near Phoenix.
A third llama, which must have been the obedient one, stayed behind when the trailer opened.
The daring duo darted in and out of traffic in Sun City —according to the Arizona Republic  — as the nation watched livestreams of their O.J.-like flight, and the Twittersphere lighted up with updates on the #llamadrama.
The Post devoted six reporters to the story.

The llamas were rounded up by onlookers after an hour, but their fame has lived on (and maybe inspired others of their kind).


Chacha, the male chimp 


Chacha, the male chimp, was on the loose nearly two hours Thursday after it disappeared from the Yagiyama Zoological Park in Sendai, the city that’s hosting finance ministers from the Group of Seven industrialized nations in May.

TV footage showed Chacha perched atop the pole, agitated and screaming at zoo workers below. Even after being hit by a sedative arrow in the back, Chacha desperately tried to escape, dangling from a power line.

He finally gave up and fell head down into a blanket held by a dozen workers on the ground.

Zoo officials told Agence France-Presse that Chacha is doing well and currently recovering from sedation.


OF COURSE MANY OTHER ZOO ANIMALS HAVE ATTEMPTED ESCAPE AND THE ABOVE ARE JUST A FEW THAT MADE HEADLINES, BUT THE FACT REMAINS THAT HUMANS HAVE EXTERMINATED MANY SPECIES ALREADY, MAKING ZOOS WHAT SOME CONSIDER A "SAFE HAVEN" FOR RARE AND ENDANGERED SPECIES.

ZOOS ARE NOT HAVENS. 
THEY'RE JUST ANIMAL PRISONS.
THEY WOULD NOT BE NECESSARY IF HUMANS WEREN'T SO TERRIFIED OF OTHER ANIMALS, SCARED ENOUGH TO KILL FIRST BEFORE GIVING IT A THOUGHT.  

WELL, THE SMITHSONIAN ONCE HAD A HUMAN IN THE BRONX ZOO...

In 1904, several Pygmies were brought to live in the anthropology exhibit at the St. Louis World's Fair. Two years later, a Congo Pygmy named Ota Benga was housed temporarily at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City—and then exhibited, briefly and controversially, at the Bronx Zoo.      

The zoo discontinued the exhibit in the Monkey House, but now Ota Benga was hounded by visitors as he walked the zoo’s grounds. 

An incident with zookeepers in which he apparently threatened them with a knife led to his removal, first to a New York orphan asylum and later to a Lynchburg, Virginia seminary.



On March 22, 1916, he shot himself in the heart with a stolen revolver.

SO MAYBE WE'RE NEXT SOMEWHERE DOWN THE ROAD?

AFTER ALL, OUR GOVERNMENT ALREADY HAS US UNDER 24-HOUR CONSTANT SURVEILLANCE... THE NEXT LOGICAL STEP IS TO LOCK US AWAY, ISN'T IT, SINCE THEY'RE SO TERRIFIED OF US?
FREEDOM....ANIMALS WANT IT AS MUCH AS WE DO. 
BUT IT'S BECAUSE OF US THEY LOST THEIRS.  
WHEN ALL RARE ANIMALS OF EARTH HAVE TO BE "PROTECTED" FROM HUMANS, ISN'T THERE SOMETHING VERY WRONG WITH THAT?  


DOESN'T THAT PROVE WHO'S ENDANGERING WHOM?