zoos アーカイブ - 地球のB面

A man in a black Spider-Man-style mask enters a zoo, removes a sign from the wall, spreads out a colorful peace banner, arranges Pokémon plush toys on the ground, scatters 80 Pokémon cards across the area and then rides away on a motorcycle.

It sounds like a scene invented for the internet. But in September 2026, something very close to that actually happened on the Thai resort island of Koh Samui.

Thai newspaper Khaosod reported the case in detail on September 20. Police said the suspect, a 36-year-old French national identified as Sacha, had been arrested at a hotel on Koh Samui at around 6 p.m. on September 19. The exact time of the zoo intrusion was not specified in the report, so September 20 is better understood as the date the case was widely reported, rather than the confirmed date of the incident itself.

In 2026, Taipei Zoo had an unusual run of animals getting outside their designated enclosures.

On May 18, a southern tamandua may have used a banana tree that snapped while she was climbing it as an accidental escape route. On July 4, a brown spider monkey jumped into the water and swam across. Then, on September 17, two chimpanzees got through doors that had not been properly secured.

The strange part is not simply that several animals escaped from the same zoo. It is that the “exit” was different almost every time. A tree, a body of water, and finally a human failure to lock a door. Put the incidents side by side, and this becomes more than a collection of quirky zoo stories.