No Doubt Bored, Zoo Boar Bolts, Followed by Duiker

A 200-pound European wild boar escaped from its San Diego Zoo enclosure Sunday afternoon and in the ensuing commotion a duiker, an African antelope, jumped a fence and bolted through various exhibits and walkways, zoo officials said.

“No one was injured, and no animals were injured,” said zoo spokesman Jeff Jouett. “Lots of people saw them and took pictures, but no one’s life was endangered.”

It was not known how the big boar escaped from its exhibit space, according to Jouett.

“We occasionally have escapes but it’s usually the antelopes or, recently, the orangutans,” Jouett said. “Rarely do we get two different animals escaping at roughly the same time, and this is the first time in recent memory a boar has escaped.”

While there was no estimate as to how many people were in the immediate area of the escapes, Jouett said Sunday was a “pretty busy day” at the zoo, with about 17,000 people visiting the park.

About 3:40 p.m. a visitor in the northeast corner of the zoo flagged down a passing tour bus and told the driver that he had seen a boar roaming through the park, according to Jouett.

“The tour bus guide called into the bus depot and they called security,” he said. “We found him (the boar) between a fence and a row of bushes behind an exhibit housing some ostriches and gazelles.”

Zookeepers trapped the boar by positioning themselves at both ends of the fence until veterinarians arrived with a tranquilizer dart, Jouett said.

“The animal never did fall down asleep,” he said. “We used a light dosage, because when an animal has its adrenaline going like that you don’t want to give it a whole lot of that stuff.”

By about 4:40 p.m. the boar was drowsy enough for the keepers to herd it into a crate and bring it back to a holding area behind its enclosure, Jouett said.

“Unfortunately, the crate they were herding the boar into was right behind the duiker’s enclosure,” Jouett said. “The noise and commotion got to it, and it jumped six or seven feet over the chain-link fence surrounding its exhibit.”

He described the duiker as a small member of the deer family, less than 100 pounds, with large fang-like canine teeth.

The duiker “cut across the giraffe exhibit, took a path down a hill that leads toward the panda exhibit,” Jouett said. “It ran through a special food stand, through a group of people. They just started taking its picture.”

“It then went left up Dog and Cat Canyon about 200 yards, to our Kopje area,” he said. “That’s an area that is a pile of boulders with a path through the middle. It ran around the boulders, then through the area on the path.”

Zookeepers were able to trap the duiker on the path and throw a net over it, Jouett said.

The zoo tour buses, which usually depart every 20 minutes, were stalled between 3:45 and 4:45 p.m. because of the commotion, he said.

“We tried to cordon off the area as best we could, and we were doing OK until the duiker got loose,” Jouett said. “He covered a lot of ground in 20 minutes.”

The boar was up and moving by 6 p.m., and both animals were doing fine Sunday night, according to Jouett. Zoo officials will look at the boar’s enclosure today to try to figure out how it escaped.