Happy Friday, friends.
Now settle in for a little weirdness and a lot of entertainment.
Zoos, no matter how excellent their conservation work is, can be sad places. So what you’re about to see is a welcome change of pace.
Every year, a zoo in Japan run ‘escape drills’ where people dress up as animals and go on a full-scale rampage, while zoo officials try to catch them.
It looks a lot like a furry convention gone bad, but it’s a good laugh.
Here’s VICE:
These drills are orchestrated because the region is earth-quake prone, and the zoo wants to prepare for enclosure damage. They are also completely amazing.
This particular drill, with its very committed polar bear actor, took place recently at Tobe Zoo:
Lord give me the commitment of a guy they forced into a polar bear costume going full method during an escape drill at a zoo pic.twitter.com/wPSBZ6hwpb
— James Felton (@JimMFelton) June 27, 2019
The person going full method in the role of the polar bear took no prisoners. He isn’t the only one.
Though all of this, the employees working to “capture” the polar bear actor maintain a disaffected solemnity—their blank eyes stare into the middle distance as they get pushed, run around, and shoot darts. (And even the actual, real, honest-to-God polar bear in the beginning of the video looks bored as hell.) It’s obviously just another day of work to these employees.
But it begs the question: What kind of budget do they have for this sort of thing? One assumes it’s a lot, if it’s a regular event—the drill has included people wearing animal costumes from gorillas to zebras to lions. So, are they hiring? Asking…for a friend.
Here’s a video of the entire cast of animals that “escape” at Tobe Zoo:
And the Oscar goes to..?
[source:vice]
