John O’Reilly, a forest manager in western Ireland, could hardly believe his eyes when he saw the grainy video on his phone, sent to him by a truck driver. There, slinking through the woodlands of County Clare, in Ireland, was the impossible: A stocky, tan-coloured animal with a shaggy mane and tufted tail, lumbering into the trees and then out of view.“You’re saying, ‘Christ, that couldn’t be what it looks like,'” O’Reilly recalled. A lion? The video began spreading on news sites and social media in Ireland, prompting both speculation and scepticism.After nearly a week, Ireland’s police force, known as An Garda Siochana, solved the confounding case. The creature was no apex predator. It was a shaggy Newfoundland dog. Its name? Mouse.“Gardai from Killaloe have concluded that the recent video of a ‘lion like’ animal roaming around the woods in East Clare is in fact the very friendly dog named ‘Mouse’,” police said in a post on social platform X, along with photos of a calm, docile dog, whose shaved fur resembled a lion’s mane and tail.Despite the proximity to Halloween, it’s still unclear why Mouse had been groomed to look like a lion. Veterinary doctors do not recommend shaving water dogs like Newfoundlands, whose coats protect them from the elements.It is the amusing end to a saga that O’Reilly said began weeks ago, when construction crews and workers in the East Clare area noticed a large animal moving among the trees. They assumed it was a deer or a trick of the light, he said. And then came that video, from the truck driver. O’Reilly, who runs a private forest-management company in neighbouring County Meath, said he decided to report the video to the Gardai because of safety concerns. Police, as perplexed as anyone at the apparent sight of a lion in Ireland, initially asked O’Reilly if it could have been made with artificial intelligence, he said.The video could’ve been “everything from a dog, to a wannabe Al Pacino in Scarface keeping an animal in the woods to protect his grow house,” O’Reilly said of the possibilities he considered – adding that it wouldn’t be the first time an exotic animal was found roaming the island.It wouldn’t even be the first lion – in a 1951 incident that is now island lore, a lioness escaped from a lion tamer’s home in Dublin, where it was once legal to keep the large cats. The lioness mauled a city teenager before being shot by police.Lions have not inhabited the European continent in thousands of years. But the Irish, ironically, once cultivated a reputation for breeding the captive wildcats, which were marquee items of many circuses and shows in the mid-century. The famed MGM lion, with his luxurious mane, bore the Irish name Cairbre and was born at the Dublin zoo.
