Zoo Practices Polar Bear Breakout Fri Feb 22, 6:37 AM ET
TOKYO (Reuters) - Keepers at a Japanese zoo packed with children scrambled Friday to catch an escaped polar bear -- except it was a fellow employee in a bear suit.
The exercise, a semi-annual drill at Tokyo's Ueno Zoo, was based on the premise that an earthquake had tumbled the walls of the polar bear enclosure, allowing the giant animals to run wild.
Zoo employees dressed in hard hats stretched nets across paths as the bear -- a cartoonish figure with an oversized head and feet -- ambled around, occasionally pretending to savage people as others poked at it with long poles.
It was finally "tranquilized," wrapped in a net and trundled away.
Zoo employee Naoki Tabata said real breakouts have occurred, although not recently, and the drills were useful.
But Toru Hirose, who played the bear, saw limits to the usefulness of the exercise.
"You don't really have an idea of how animals will behave until it happens," he said as he donned the suit.
Harumi Tokiwa, a kindergarten teacher visiting the zoo with her pupils, said an escaped polar bear would be scary.
"I guess if that happened, we'd probably just be eaten."
Six-year-old Miyo Fujioka was undaunted.
"I'd get my brother who's learning karate to go and beat it up," she said.
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