Search Exotic Incidents Database

Responding to a motorist’s report of an alligator on the loose, a law enforcement officer captured a 2-ft-long alligator sitting in the street at the intersection of Pederson and Erbes Roads. Animal Control officers later took the alligator to their facility where CA Fish and Game would investigate and re-home the alligator.

A 66-year-old man who owned an exotic animal operation was gored several times and killed by a male red deer, a European species that weighs about 400 lbs. Wildlife experts theorized that the deer was reacting aggressively because it was mating season.

A 73-year-old Nye County woman died after her wolf hybrids attacked her. All eight animals were euthanized.

Jim, a western lowland gorilla, busted out of his night stall at the Los Angeles Zoo when it was not secured.

Jim, a western lowland gorilla, jumped across the moat and into the waterfall between two gorilla exhibits at the Los Angeles Zoo. Jim apparently went to investigate noises the nearby gorillas were making. Keepers used a water hose to get him back into his enclosure. This is second time Jim escaped.

A Nubian ibex (type of goat) slipped past a keeper and out of the holding area at the Los Angeles Zoo, not once, but twice. On one of those times the ibex spent the night in a service station before she was discovered.

An employee of a store that sold reptiles and snakes was bitten by a western diamondback rattlesnake on 09/26/07. The man was initially treated at Memorial Pembroke Hospital with six vials of antivenin and would likely receive additional treatments to combat the effects of the bite.

A rhesus macque that bit two children on 09/23/07 remained at large while authorities continued to search for the woman with whom the macque had been observed around the area. See followup 11/06/07.

A man was charged and indicted for stealing three endangered iguanas from a nature preserve in Fihi and smuggling them into the U.S. in his prosthetic leg.

Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies arrested a pet shop owner after investigators found numerous dead animals in the store. Detectives found 33 dead animals. The owner told detectives he was just lazy and never went back when he ran into financial difficulty before the grand opening of the pet shop. One hundred sixty reptiles, amphibians, rodents, and invertebrates went without food, water or care for three weeks.