Zoo must be confusing

Hands up everyone who was expecting it to be a special lion!

@rdm "Hands up"? U here to steal our lions? ;-)

I guess it could also be a fish. Or a frog maybe.

Me: (looking at the comments) Oh goodness sake, it's the white-and-gold/black-and-blue dress and laurel/yanny memes all over again.

Perhaps it was a jungle shark

Maybe it was a lion boar. What politician visited recently? (lying bore for those using English as their second language)

From the video they showed in the news, definitely not a lion. Tail WAY too short and movement definitely that of a hoofed animal.

So yes, it was a boar. There are many memes now.

Fun fact: Belgium tastes like French fries.

@Greenhorn they are belgian fries

Got news for Germany; I lived there for years and I've *seen* the pic of the "wild boar." I was at a wildlife park the day one of the boars there uprooted the fence and a fully-grown boar, sow and their offspring all got out-- I saw them up close and personal. (European boars look freakin' PREHISTORIC.) The critter in that pic is NOT a boar, and a five-year-old could tell that. At a best guess I'd say a lioness, but it could also be a mountain lion-- rounded ears, no mane, generally a fairly light color for all parts of the animal that can be seen. I hope it's caught safely.

@Ysabet I've seen both pictures, and living in a place with wild big cats (Cougar, or Mountain Lion. Nobody around here calls them Puma.) (and Bobcat, a relative of the Lynx) I can tell you that is not a big cat of any kind. What it looks most like to me is nothing more than a domestic cow calf. Something else I've seen plenty of.

Could it be a wild European boar? Possibly, but it doesn't look right for that either. The neck doesn't look right.

@Tarmaque Can you provide links to the images in question?

@Unatsiwaya It's easy enough to find them by doing an image search for "Germany" and "Lion," but here's as good a one as any.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/lion-police-search-germany-wild-boar-berlin-rcna95501

@Ysabet I can well believe someone saw a boar, only like you say, it cannot be the animal in the picture of the alleged lionness I saw — proportions and colour totally wrong. (There are lots of wild boar in that area; I have heard reports from friends how the boar uprooted everything in their gardens again and again.) The picture I saw *would* fit a lionness, but was too unclear to be sure.
I could imagine someone illegally had a lionness as a "pet" that broke free. They will of course not out themselves as having that animal missing.

@jyrgen That was my thought when I saw this, except he kind of was outing himself: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66265874

I'm waiting til they add chupacabra to the zoo before I get excited about anything. So many sightings, so many photos, yet never the actual animal. C'mon, Chupa! Show yourself!

Sounds like the Ruokolahti Lion in Finland years ago. It was supposed to be a female though, so no tale-telling mane here. Anyway, the theory was that either all the people who saw it were mistaken or it was a runaway from an illegal Russian circus.