Police Tasered a zebra that escaped and was running free near a school – further agitating the animal before its eventual capture hours later.
Officers with the Cookeville Police Department in Tennessee responded to a call around 4am on Friday that a zebra had escaped Triple W Livestock Auction on West Cemetery Road. Cops and Putnam County Sheriff’s deputies assisted Triple W employees in trying to catch the ‘agitated animal,’ the Cookeville Police Department said in a Facebook post on Friday afternoon.
‘Even though the zebra ran onto Highway 111, the lack of traffic at that time of day allowed officers to attempt multiple methods of regaining control of the animal in an effort to minimize injury to the zebra, the motoring public, and everyone on scene,’ the police department wrote.
Law enforcement officials even tried using Tasers to temporarily shock and incapacitate the striped creature.
‘At some point, two officers of the Cookeville Police Department apparently made unsuccessful attempts to deploy issued Taser devices to redirect or capture the animal,’ the post stated.
But Tasering the zebra did not work, leading Prescott South Elementary School to post on Facebook: ‘Good Morning Prescott Families – There is a zebra on the loose in the Prescott area. It escaped a truck, was tased, and is mad. Do not approach (Yes, really).’
Prescott South Middle School teacher Ashley Danielle Francis did not believe the post at first, but 10 minutes later while driving, she saw the zebra with her own eyes. She snapped a couple of photos of it and posted them on Facebook.
‘It’s just the craziest thing I think I’ve ever seen in this town, small town Cookeville, Tennessee, and then there’s just a zebra on the highway,’ Francis told WSMV. ‘I was about 20 seconds away from the school, like pulling off the highway to come to school, and it didn’t seem mad, it just seems scared.’
Francis added, ‘It was a little one too, it wasn’t a full-grown zebra.’
The police department wrote that ‘regardless, the zebra was cornered and directed onto a transport trailer’ around 7.15am the same day.
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