Welp, just in case you’d thought for a minute second that maybe everything wasn’t hopeless bullshit after all, some utter jerk goes and steals a super-endangered tortoise from the zoo and everything is spiders once again.
Staff at the Perth Zoo have reported the disappearance – tortoise-napping, if you will – of a 10-year-old radiated tortoise, in what appears to be a case of out-and-out theft.
The animal disappeared from its enclosure at some point on Monday night, with workers noticing it was gone when they arrived at the zoo on Tuesday morning.
The species is officially listed as being “critically endangered” and the concerns are that this particular animal will be sold on the black market. Thanks to its stunning shell, the radiated tortoise is regularly traded on the illegal wildlife market, and individual specimens can fetch as much as $10,000.
In fact, the first suggested search when you type “radiated tortoise” into Google is this:
Poaching and a loss of habitat have resulted in the numbers of the Madagascar-native creature dwindling.
Previous instances of tortoise-theft have returned no perpetrators, and in this instance the thieves appear to have circumvented the zoo’s “very robust” security systems.
The animal has a specialised, grass-based diet, and requires constant thermo-regulating. Zoo staff hold fears for the creature’s safety.
Anyone with any information about the theft is urged to contact police.
Source: Perth Now.
Photo: Ten News Perth/Twitter.
