If a black bear ever escapes the Hitachi City Kamine Zoo, staff will be more than ready.
Mainichi reports the zoo, located in Japan’s Ibaraki Prefecture, held a drill to practice for this exact scenario. The zoo included local police, firefighters and pest control on the exercise. In all, 40 people were in on it.
The zoo dressed a worker in a bear suit and tasked them with running around during the emergency drill, so people could prepare for the unlikely possibility of the zoo’s Asian black bear getting loose.
The drill pretended a major earthquake broke the window to the bear’s enclosure. To wrangle the “bear,” staff used nets and other means to corral it into a corner to safely fire a tranquilizer gun.
The worker had to pretend to collapse and not move. The team then returned the fake bear back to where it belonged.