On Thursday afternoon, the children at a summer camp in Dietwil, a village in the canton of Aargau, saw a grey animal with a long tail passing by the edge of the woods. It took the camp leader a moment to realise what he was looking at: a wallaby. That’s what many people in Switzerland call a ‘little kangaroo’. They called the Aargau cantonal police, who in turn contacted all possible owners in the area: farms, a regional zoo… nobody had lost any animals. There are three authorised wallaby farms in the canton of Aargau, but none of them reported anything. The animal’s origin remained a mystery until Friday.
On Friday afternoon, the matter was resolved. The owner turned out to be a resident of the canton of Lucerne with an ‘authorised licence’ to keep wallabies. The animal had slipped through a small hole in its enclosure and had decided to explore Aargau. It was found in a wooded area and tranquillised from a moving car, 17 metres away. The head of the large animal rescue service confirmed this to Tele M1: “We were able to tranquillise it from the moving vehicle.” The wallaby is back home and recovering from the anaesthetic.
In Switzerland, it is perfectly legal to keep a wallaby, provided you have authorisation from the cantonal vet. Aargau has several such farms. What nobody had anticipated was that the animal would decide to go on an inter-cantonal sightseeing trip. The children at the camp, on the other hand, are still coming to terms with the fact that what they saw wasn’t just a very large hare. And the camp leader now has a story to tell on the first day of term.