Tiger Tiger, burning bright– in suburban France, and no one has any idea where it came from.
A police helicopter and firefighters are on the hunt for a tiger in the Seine-et-Marne district east of the French capital, just a few miles away from Disneyland Paris, Sky News reports.
A local claimed to have taken a picture of the animal in a supermarket parking lot in the small town of Montevrain on Thursday, and alerted the authorities to the possibility that a potentially 570 pound big cat was stalking children in a major metropolitan area.
The official response to the grainy photograph, which appears to show either a tiger or a cat has erred overwhelmingly on the side of caution.
Local children are being kept inside their school for fear of the alleged tiger.
“We have been running after it since this morning, police officers are trying to intercept it,” a police source stated. Local civilian authorities have been no less diligent.
“We are calling on inhabitants to be careful, not to leave their houses and to stay in their vehicles,” said town hall official Cedric Tartaud-Gineste, adding that anyone who sees the tiger should call the police or the fire department. Presumably, the officers are not trained specifically in the art of tiger-wrangling, and it is unclear how they will proceed when and if the tiger is found.
Police have stated that they will try to catch it alive: “If it’s possible, we’ll try and put it to sleep. If it becomes dangerous or aggressive, the order will be given to kill it”
Tartaud-Ginesse stated that a security cordon has been set up around a wooded area covering an area of seven to nine acres.
The wife of Montevrain’s supermarket manager is one of those who claims to have seen the tiger.
“My wife saw it this morning,” grocer Jean-Baptiste Bordeax told the AFP news agency.
“She didn’t get out of the car and called me to say ‘I think I saw a lynx.'”
All inquiries into where the tiger came from have been inconclusive. Neither a traveling circus nor Disneyland Paris provided any leads. It is unclear whether the private menagerie of an eccentric billionaire is anywhere near the area.