As Christmas nears, things start to generally get tense for Santa, and for this one especially. A confused-looking seal, dubbed "Santa the seal" by onlookers, ended up stopping traffic after somehow getting loose on a highway.
The Cape fur seal found its way to the road in Cape Town, South Africa, on December 21, local channel News24 reported.
"It seems not even Cape Town's wildlife is immune to the Christmas spirit!" wrote Cape of Good Hope SPCA, the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, in the caption of a YouTube video of the scene.
"At a time of year when the shops are packed and companies are vying for our attention with all kinds of gimmicks in order to sell the latest fad, we are quite used to seeing strange things at the malls, but when the Cape of Good Hope SPCA Wildlife Department received a call about a Cape fur seal crossing the busy Jakes Gerwel Drive opposite the Vangate Mall in Athlone this morning, even we had to wonder..."
Cape fur seals, also known as brown fur seals, live in the Southern Hemisphere. They have two subspecies: one off the coast of South Africa and another, the Australian fur seals, that live off South Australia and Tasmania. African males grow to around 6.5 feet long on average, with females growing to around 4.9 feet.
They usually stay close to shore, living on rocky ledges and stony beaches. One small rocky island around 3 miles off the coast of Cape Town is even named Seal Island due to the influx of fur seals that haul onto it: around 64,000 seals are thought to live on the island. These seals are one of the main food sources for great white sharks living in the South African waters, but they are also eaten by killer whales and even southern elephant seals.
Cape of Good Hope SPCA chief inspector Jaco Pieterse told News24 that the animal rescue team was at the scene within minutes of receiving reports of the loose seal.
"Santa" eventually made her way off the road and towards residential houses, before she was captured in a net and placed in a transport container.
"Santa was uninjured, but however was in distress. She was safely released," Pieterse told Newsweek.
She was then driven to Lagoon Beach in Milnerton, where she was released by the team. Santa immediately waddled back towards the ocean and swam off, as seen in another video posted by Cape of Good Hope SPCA.
Luckily, nobody had gotten too close to the seal when she was on the road. When they feel threatened, Cape fur seals and other seals can react aggressively, and may end up injuring someone approaching them. In the wild, these seals are general friendly, often swimming alongside scuba divers.
The ocean is around 7.5 miles away from where the seal was found in one direction, and 11 miles away in the other.
"Quite how a seal got to be there in the first place, so far from the ocean, will remain a mystery. One theory is that it had swum into a canal and was washed further away by strong currents, or that it was intended to be an unusual Christmas gift for someone's mother-in-law and then merely dumped when its captor saw the price of fish!" Pieterse said.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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Jess Thomson is a Newsweek Science Reporter based in London UK. Her focus is reporting on science, technology and healthcare. ... Read more
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