Kangaroos don’t make much news in Australia, but Europe’s surprisingly large pet kangaroo population seems to make the news often enough, mostly by running away from home. We’ve covered it before, but now the story involves two kangaroos fleeing the same corral in the same week.
This time the escapees were in Germany, not in Austria, where their presence is always the subject of jokes about the country’s name. The first marsupial ditched its pen in the small village of Untertraubenbach, near the Czech border, but was quickly retrieved by neighbors of the owner, who keeps several kangaroos.
The second followed a few days later, and has been seen here and there around the village but has not been captured. Exotic pets are something of a thing in Germany, and especially Bavaria. The German Nature Conservation Society estimates that between 2010 and 2015, over 10,000 exotic mammals were offered for sale in Germany.
The kangaroo whose picture is above is not one of the current escapees; he’s Skippy, appropriately named, who made a break for it in 2005 and wandered, hopped perhaps, all over the area for several weeks before being captured in a pasture in northern Hesse.
