Last week they had a “lion hunt” in Berlin. Now it’s relatively certain: it was just a large, lightly marked boar.
The “Lion Hunt” in the Berlin area came to an end, but until the end, no one knew for sure what animal it was. Now there is relative certainty.
The results of an analysis of hair and feces samples from the site where an alleged lioness was sighted in the Berlin city limits point only to a wild boar. This was announced by the municipal administration of Kleinmachnow in Brandenburg on Monday, with reference to the first laboratory test results from the Leibniz Institute for Zoological and Wildlife Research in Berlin. The assumption that a lion was roaming freely in the area was “therefore further invalidated”.
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After an alleged sighting of a lion near Kleinmachnow, documented with cellphone video, up to 300 police, along with hunters and wildlife experts, scoured a wooded area on the Brandenburg-Berlin border for more than 30 hours last week. On Friday, authorities halted the search again because there were growing doubts that a lioness was indeed on the way.
Posture “exposes” wild boar
In addition to the complete lack of any concrete evidence of the existence of a big cat, a new analysis of the video of the sighting by experts played a decisive role. Contrary to the authorities’ initial assessments, based on details of the physique and posture, they came to the conclusion that it was probably an unusually light-colored boar. No lions were reported missing either.
At the site of the sighting, traces of wild boar were found, as well as hair and feces of initially unknown origin. According to the Kleinmachnow municipal administration, initial analyzes of the samples at the Leibniz Institute have now shown that the faeces contain a high proportion of plant material and presumably did not come from a carnivorous animal. The fur, on the other hand, is visually similar to that of the wild boar and does not have characteristics typical of cat fur.
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Consequently, the test results are still preliminary, in part because the experts didn’t have boar hair for a final comparison. However, experts have already established that the hair presented to them is “fundamentally different” from that of a lion or a cat. Among other things, lion fur is very thin and also easily deformed.
Navigation account 20 minutes Time24.07.2023, 17:54| Act: 07/24/2023, 7:26 pm