Ringo Bearly Avoids Run-In With Rhino

For the fourth time since the exhibit opened last summer, one of the San Diego Zoo’s Malaysian Sun Bears escaped, scraping a toe hold through a wire covering and climbing up and over a wall Thursday afternoon. He later came nose-to-nose with a 2,000-pound rhinoceros before being tranquilized by a keeper.

“It would have been a fatal confrontation for the bear if he had gotten in there with the rhino,” said zoo spokesman Jeff Jouett.

Jouett said the $3.5-million exhibit, which has been marred by escapes since it opened, will be closed indefinitely until architects and keepers “have studied the problem and made necessary repairs and revisions.”

Jouett called this escape the most serious, in the sense that the animal--a 100-pound male named Ringo, who had bolted the exhibit twice before--”traveled the farthest (40 yards uphill and 40 yards back) and was gone the longest time (about half an hour).”

He said Ringo “scraped some toe holds in the Gunite (a cement-like substance sprayed on a wire frame) and climbed up and over the wall” about 3:30 p.m.

He then walked to Elephant Mesa and made his way to the back fence of the rhino exhibit. There, he was shot with a tranquilizer dart.

Jouett said the bears have chosen a different escape route each time.

“We expected they would reach and climb and claw, but we didn’t expect them to stand on each other’s backs,” Jouett said. “We didn’t expect them to work together to push logs downhill and up and over the moat.”

Last fall, Ringo climbed over a wall and ended up on the patio of Sun Bear Forest. Onlookers apparently thought it was part of a show and made an attempt to cozy up to Ringo, who was just trying to act naturally.

Once, before that escape, Muffin, Ringo’s female playmate, escaped with him. Spot, another of the bears, escaped once on his own.