Animals stolen from zoos

birdsandbats

birdsandbats

Well-Known Member
5+ year member
I was looking up stuff about Special Memories Zoo, and I found a story that a Red Kangaroo joey and four baby goats were once stolen from the zoo. The joey was stolen right out of the mother's pouch! The mother was injured in the process. Does anyone else know of any animals stolen from zoos? Was the thief ever found? What was his/her punishment?
 
And yes, the joey was very young, and likely died after it was stolen.:( As far as I know, the thief was never found.
 
Most animals in zoos are not really "stealable" as they're too large and/or dangerous to just catch and bring home. However...

There have been several cases in a wide range of countries where parrots, reptiles (tortoises/lizards/snakes) and small primates (tamarins/marmosets/lemurs) have been stolen from zoos and clearly were destined for the private market.
Penguins also seem to be the occasional target, but I only know one case where the perpetrator, a 10-year-old boy, actually wanted to keep it. Other penguins have been stolen by thoughtless youth that are just plain stupid, drunk, want to impress a women or want to protest against animals in captivity (those "bright" animal liberators actually caused the death of two penguin chicks).

The difficult situation in Venezuela has apparently resulted in zoo animals being stolen for food!
Zoo animals are being stolen and eaten in Venezuela
 
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AFAIK, a boy stealing a penguin from a zoo is an urban legend. Penguins have sharp beak and claws, and hit with a flipper is rather like being hit with a ruler.
 
Jurek7 said:
AFAIK, a boy stealing a penguin from a zoo is an urban legend. Penguins have sharp beak and claws, and hit with a flipper is rather like being hit with a ruler.
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the "penguin in a backpack" is an urban legend, which has been around since at least the 1990s - it started out with the thief being a person with mental disabilities and morphed into a child in later versions, although it still commonly appears as a person with (for example) autism. It's always one of those typical stories where someone "knows someone" and it is "definitely true".

However, there are true stories of penguins being stolen as well, e.g. the following article from Australia is genuine: Nocookies
 
Several years ago (as detailed on ZooChat), someone broke in at night and cut a fence and stole an ocelot from Le Parc Des Felins. As far as I know they were never caught and the ocelot was never found.

Perhaps twenty years ago or so, a cockatoo was stolen during zoo hours from an open exhibit at Reid Park Zoo. The perpetrator sold it to someone and when the bird got sick the new owner happened to take it to the same veterinarian that served the zoo. The bird said its own name which the vet recognized, so then he scanned the microchip and confirmed it was the same bird. It was safely returned to the zoo (though I am not sure if the person who stole it originally was ever revealed or punished).
 
In 2014, 2 adult female cotton-top tamarins, 1 baby and 2 adult male emperor tamarins were stolen from Blackpool Zoo.

The adults were all later found on a doorstep but the baby never was :(
 
Chester had birds of paradise and parrots stolen in 1971. They have also had golden eagles , Leadbeater's cockatoos, hawk-headed parrots and blue-throated conures stolen in the past.
 
Chlidonias said:
However, there are true stories of penguins being stolen as well, e.g. the following article from Australia is genuine: Nocookies
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I seem to remember a Penguin( probably Black-footed) being taken from the Flamingo Gardens Park(now closed) on the Isle of Wight and the theft made the newspapers but it was never found. Some time later someone reported they had seen it while they were bathing in the sea somewhere off Portsmouth, but this was probably confusion with an Auk sp.like Guillemot, which sometimes come very close inshore among bathers.
 
Pertinax said:
I seem to remember a Penguin( probably Black-footed) being taken from the Flamingo Gardens Park(now closed) on the Isle of Wight and the theft made the newspapers but it was never found.
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I thought that was at Amazon World? Still Isle of Wight though.
 
However, there are true stories of penguins being stolen as well....
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Thanks to the people correcting the child-and-penguin story. I should evidently have checked it before writing a reply based on my questionable memory!
In addition to the true Australian and Isle of Wight penguins already mentioned in earlier posts, there was a penguin stolen from Luisenpark (Germany) earlier this year and later found death, a penguin stolen last year from Bayworld (South Africa) by animal liberators, ending in the death of its two chicks, one stolen in 2015 from Atlantic Sea Park (Norway) that was never recovered, another stolen from Dublin Zoo (Ireland) in 2010 in an apparent "prank" and later found on a street, etc. Sadly, it seems that penguins are the occasional target of this sort of human behavior. Although it is undoubtedly true that penguins are able to defend themselves well with their beaks, in my limited experience —two days of helping marking Magellanic's in Argentina— I found them to be more docile than I had expected. Nothing like banding things like gulls where even small species can be a pain, literally!

As mentioned earlier, there are many cases where species more "suited" for selling to the private market (parrots, some reptiles, some smaller primates) have been stolen from zoos. If googling e.g. "parrot stolen zoo" or "monkey stolen zoo" there are quite a lot of results involving zoos in Australia, Europe and North America.
 
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