Elephants Rampage Through Seoul

by hilzoy

That’s the headline on a BBC story today:

“South Korea’s busy capital Seoul faced an added complication on Wednesday when six elephants escaped from an amusement park, causing chaos.
The elephants broke into a restaurant in the east of the city, and tore through the garden of a private home.

Officials said one elephant was briefly detained at a police station, before all were returned to their park.

“It seems one of them panicked, causing the others to also panic and flee the grounds,” one official said.”

I am reminded of one of the odder wartime stories I have heard: I once knew someone who was the head of a Jerusalem zoo during the 1967 war. Apparently the zoo was near an army base of some sort, and the Jordanian army’s shells all hit the zoo instead of the base. As my friend was dealing with the various problems caused by a zoo’s taking serious fire, she got a phone call from Me’a She’arim, an orthodox neighborhood, saying that a rhinoceros had been seen ambling down the streets there. So my friend hopped into her jeep and drove off to find it, and the only way she could think of to induce it to return to the zoo was to attach a bucket full of lettuce to the back of the jeep and drive very slowly back. (You will recall that there was a war on, and she was driving slowly through shelling and gunfire.)

Some weeks later, after the war was over, she was at a party, and was introduced to someone, who looked at her and said: you don’t know me, but I will never forget you. I was sitting in a foxhole with my unit, hardly daring to move, when all of a sudden, in the midst of all this shelling, what should I see but a blonde valkyrie in a jeep driving slowly though the middle of a war zone, followed by a rhinoceros. — Apparently he had had to ask the rest of his unit to look, to make sure he hadn’t cracked under fire and begun to hallucinate.