South Carolina Has an Escaped Emu Problem (On Top of That Monkey Thing)

Remember those 43 monkeys that escaped from a South Carolina research facility? Well, most of them have been recaptured with only eight remaining free as of yesterday’s reports. But now another exotic species has joined the party. This time, it’s emus.

In northern Horry County, two emus have been on the loose for three months after breaking out of their enclosure. The emus are owned by the father of a woman named Sam Morace. And thus far, all the Morace family’s attempts to recapture them have failed spectacularly.

They say they’re trying to get approval to use tranquilizers to finally take them down and bring them in. “They are feral and not trained like the ones we have at the house,” Morace confessed in a Facebook post Tuesday. The family says “feral,” I read that as code for “assholes.”

Emus are giant flightless birds that can get up to 6 feet tall, weigh as much as 120 pounds, and lay gigantic, foul-smelling eggs that extreme health nuts love. They are sometimes referred to as “living dinosaurs” because they have so many features identical to their very distant dinosaur ancestors.

Some paleontologists believe that of all living modern animals, emus’ movements most closely resemble dinosaurs. They can run up to 30 miles an hour and are highly intelligent. They are also rather curious, so they will absolutely get into some shit that most other loose animals would ignore.