There are no African lions roaming the streets of Akron. The Akron Zoo turned to social media on Saturday, Nov. 7, to dispel rumors that its African lions had escaped their enclosure, the Akron Beacon Journal reported.
According to the Beacon Journal, zoo officials said the rumors appear to trace back in part to a drill held on Wednesday, Nov. 4, involving the Akron Police and Fire departments. The zoo stressed that it was just a drill — practice to prepare for a variety of potential emergencies at the zoo — and that no animal got out.
Zoo officials said Nov. 7 that rumors were floating around the internet, along with an AI-generated photo purporting to show an escaped lion in Akron, the Beacon Journal reported. No lion in the image was real, and neither was the escape.
“Our lions remain in the safety of their habitat,” the zoo said in a statement reported by the Akron Beacon Journal. The zoo’s resident lions are Mandisa, Donovan, Kataba and Msinga, according to the Beacon Journal.
Emergency drills like the Nov. 4 exercise are a routine part of zoo operations: they let animal-care staff rehearse their roles alongside police and fire responders before a real emergency ever happens, so that if a dangerous animal ever did get loose, every agency on scene would already know the plan. The zoo’s message Saturday was that the rehearsal is exactly what it was — a rehearsal.
The episode is a tidy example of how fast a false alarm can outrun the facts online: a real emergency drill on Wednesday supplied a kernel of truth, an AI-generated image supplied a picture that looked like proof, and by Saturday the zoo was spending its weekend assuring the public that nothing had happened at all. The zoo’s own statement — not the viral image — is the authoritative word on where its lions are.
For Akron residents who saw the AI photo or heard the rumor secondhand this weekend, the takeaway from the zoo is straightforward: Mandisa, Donovan, Kataba and Msinga never left home, no one was ever in danger, and anyone who encounters the viral image can treat it as what the zoo says it is — a hoax.
Photo: Mark Tee, CC BY