Lion Loose in Milwaukee, Cobra in Texas, Python in Missouri

While the mainstream media has been covering the tragic death of a beloved lion in Africa, some people in the U.S. are looking up from their televisions to find wild animals outside their own windows. Just this week we have a lion still on the loose in Milwaukee, a cobra slithering through Houston and a giant python chasing chickens and dogs in Missouri. Did someone leave a door open?

The lion was first reported to police by a woman in Milwaukee on July 20th. Unofficial sightings started pouring in daily, along with the national media. A police officer claimed to have seen the lion on July 25th and heavily armed cops swarmed the area the entire weekend but found nothing.

Since no zoos or wildlife preserves reported any escapes and Wisconsin is one of six states that have no restrictions on wild animal ownership, Milwaukee's alien big cat is most likely a pet. Assuming that, the Milwaukee Area Domestic Animal Control Commission has eschewed red meat and is instead baiting traps with chicken, turkey, sausages, chicken nuggets and other cheaper foods an owner might have fed the lion. As of this writing, the traps are empty.

Moving on to Missouri, chickens had been disappearing without a trace in Warren County and some people were looking for pet dogs and cats, including 3-year-old Troy Dement who saw a giant snake chasing his poodle. A wildlife expert identified it as a Burmese python that was probably an escaped pet. When another neighbor spotted it, Troy’s dad used a shotgun to kill the 14-foot 7-inch, 160 pound Burmese Python.

There’s a lot of strange creatures native to Texas but albino monocled pythons aren’t one of them, so residents of a high-rise apartment in downtown Houston called police who captured the 2-foot-long, highly poisonous snake that’s more at home in southeast Asia than in Houston high-rise hallways. Unfortunately, the cobra was later euthanized.

It’s ironic that the death of one lion in Africa has so many people angry while the imprisonment, torture and deaths of thousands of similar wild creatures in the U.S. (as well as other countries) goes on and on and on.