The Internet loves a story of animals on the lam, and for nearly three weeks, two capybaras have been starring in the latest script. The male and female duo fled handlers on the very day they arrived at the High Park Zoo in Toronto in late May, and they assiduously evaded the capture attempts of zoo workers, city officials and volunteers while residents and fans chronicled their escapade online.
The large rodents, which are native to South America, were nicknamed Bonnie and Clyde. They got Twitter accounts. They were cheered on and fretted over. A hashtag, #CapybaraWatch, was born.
Then, on Sunday evening, the caper ended – for one of them, anyway.
With the clang of a cage trap, after 19 days romping through the 400-acre wilderness of High Park, one half of the pair landed back in captivity. As of Sunday night, it was “resting off site,” according to a city councilor whose ward included the rodents’ temporary refuge.
The capture was witnessed by one civilian, a jogger whose name will be forever connected to the capybaras in a Google search. Emma Renda posted a video of the event to Instagram and told local media that the search team members began high-fiving one another when the cage door clanged shut on the capybara.
Given that the seizure of one animal finished just 50 percent of the job, it will probably breathe new life only into the remaining chapters of a tale that has been breathlessly chronicled by Canadian news outlets and on social media. It has not hurt that the narrative’s wily protagonists are essentially enormous guinea pigs.
From the day the rodents fled, capybara sightings were reported in the city’s ponds, rivers and trees. “Suddenly, there are capybaras all over Toronto,” as the Toronto Star put it.
The definitive account of the capybaras’ movements came from the zoo, which began posting occasional and wonderfully earnest news reports on its Facebook page starting on May 24, the day of the great escape. “If you are in the park around the llama end of the zoo please keep your eye open for two capybaras who are out exploring the park,” it wrote. “If spotted please do not approach as they are quite shy.”
By the next day, the zoo said, city residents had reported many sightings, but none were of the dog-sized rodents. “These we believe were groundhogs. The difference is when a capybara walks you can see their legs.”
Inside Toronto offered more capybara facts, such as: They eat their own feces, and their footprints are star-shaped. “Natural predators include pumas, jaguars, caimans and anacondas, meaning that if they run into one of their nemeses in High Park, Toronto has bigger problems than a couple of oversized guinea pigs on the loose,” the site wrote.
Traps were set out and baited with a capybara’s dream buffet: corn on the cob, fruit and veggies. A group of volunteers dubbed Team Capybara was assembled, headed by a man who’d wrangled the animals in his native Brazil. Still the pair remained free, and people began speculating that the capybaras’ max ground speed of about 20 miles per hour could mean they were far beyond city limits.
And “as their days of independence wore on, the odd-looking beasts became more than a meme,” wrote Eric Andrew-Gee of the Globe and Mail. “In their headlong, innocent quest for freedom, they grew into something at once sillier and more significant: folk heroes for the social media age.”
As debate churned in late May over the killing of Harambe, a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo, some observers held up the capybaras as an example of why animals should not be kept in captivity. Many, though, expressed concern: Could they make it on their own?
It was a valid question. The six-month-old capybaras were born and raised in the custody of a breeder in Texas. That’s thousands of miles north of the rainforests that their wild brethren call home, but still probably closer in climate to the one for which they were destined: Canada.
But they landed in Toronto during the temperate spring, and apparently the lush grounds of High Park beckoned. When they arrived at the zoo early on May 24, they were transferred from a vehicle to a cage that wasn’t fully closed. And there began their adventure.
By June 1, the zoo reported “credible sightings” of capybaras in the park. Followers, meanwhile, traded capybara memes.
By this weekend, the Toronto Wildlife Center — which already has its hands full rescuing native wildlife – decided to offer its expertise to the city. It set one of its traps on Sunday night, and two of the center’s staff hid in the bushes. Within minutes, one half of the renegade capybaras had been captured.
“The size and type of trap, as well as how and when it is set, makes all the difference,” Andrew Wight, the wildlife center’s rescue team leader, said in a statement.
And with that, one of the Twitter accounts set up in the capybaras’ name – there were a few, as well as one for the zoo’s third capybara, Chewy — signed off, its ghost writer saying that the lightness of the account had been overshadowed by the massacre in Orlando.
“Thanks, Toronto,” @HPCapybara tweeted. “It’s been fun.”
The search for No. 2 continues.
(c) 2016, The Washington Post ยท Karin Brulliard
