The Berlin lioness may have been a wild boar: the police stopped searching for the animal when they found no trace

The lioness was not. More than 30 hours of nearly continuous searching with a hundred police officers, veterinarians, fishermen, helicopters and drones ended Friday afternoon with confirmation that it was likely The alleged lioness who forced the residents of a district in southwest Berlin to lock themselves in their homes It was actually a pig. Berlin and Brandenburg police decided to stop Chase A ‘loose and dangerous’ wildebeest that set off alarm bells early Thursday morning and has kept Germans entertained ever since. The mayor of Kleinmachnau, located southwest of the capital where the alleged beast was seen, Michael Gruber, confirmed this in the early afternoon: “At the moment everything indicates that she was not a lioness.”

For hours, many experts expressed doubts regarding the only photo there was of the animal, a short video clip recorded by an animatronic passerby who thought he saw a big cat attacking a wild boar. The police gave credence to the photos, and later, as the search continued, two of their agents also believed they had seen the beast in a wooded area near Kleinmachineau. A more detailed analysis, in which even foreign experts took part – one of whom was from South Africa – came to the conclusion that the shape and posture of the body are not similar to that of a lioness.

“The shape of the back, as well as the tail and the hind leg, do not correspond to the shape of the lion, but rather to the shape of the wild boar,” the mayor said in a press release. The director of the circus in the Tilto district, Michel Rugal, told local media that he did not know there were lions in circuses or private zoos in the area, and that it was almost certainly a matter of mixing with another type of animal. The figure in the video, he told The Guardian, was “very thin and petite”. The Daily Mirror, and indicated that it could be a Caucasian Shepherd, a breed of guard dog. “I bet it’s not a lion.”

The initial sighting of an alleged big cat created great excitement in and around Kleinmachnow, a municipality of 20,000 inhabitants. Alert apps like Nina and Katwarn began broadcasting the alert at 4:30 a.m. Thursday. Soon after, all the newscasts echoed. Police asked residents of several districts in southwest Berlin, on the border with Brandenburg, to stay indoors and not let their pets outside. Nurseries and schools opened, but with instructions not to allow children to go outside.

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Tracking the exact point where the video was recorded gave no results. Only traces of wild boar, a plentiful animal, have been discovered in this wooded residential area on the outskirts of the German capital. There are no traces of a predatory cat or animal that allegedly attacked her. “I myself hunt in the area and I know that the hunters have very good dogs. It is inconceivable that they would not have found anything if a wild boar had been torn to pieces by a wild boar there,” Achim Gruber, executive director of the Institute of Zoology in Berlin, told the dpa news agency on Friday.

At night, with the search suspended due to a lack of lighting, residents of the nearby Zehlendorf neighborhood of Berlin reported to police that they had heard the lion’s supposed roar from their homes. They are proven to be deceivers with loudspeakers. He watched the Germans with great interest Chase Lioness social networks are flooded with memes. The news programs even made specials with guests commenting on the photos and interviews with the neighbors, who generally didn’t seem overly concerned.

Meanwhile, no circus or zoo has missed a lioness. Nor was there any record of any individual being able to house an animal of this type on their property. Many warnings for scenes were produced; All fake. Veterinarians and hunters were instructed to throw a narcotic dart at the lioness, to take her later to an animal protection center, but in the event of a threat to her physical safety, the hunters were given permission to fire their firearms.

Indeed, on Friday morning it began to appear that there was no lioness, but the police kept the operation alive until early afternoon as a precaution. Wildlife expert Dirk Eilert told public broadcaster RBB in the morning that he could only see wild boars in the broadcast images and was very skeptical of the lioness hypothesis because no traces appeared. “A lion cannot simply disappear. It must leave footprints, and it is remarkable that at the point where it was seen nothing was left of it.” In total, more than a hundred personnel participated in the inspection, with 30 patrols deployed throughout the area informing residents through a public address system and with the support of helicopters and drones.

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