Police in the British village of village of St. Osyth have called off their extensive lion-hunt, concluding that the creature spotted in the English countryside was not the king of the jungle after all, The Associated Press reports.  This put an end to a massive expedition involving “about 40 officers, tranquilizer-toting zoo experts, and a pair of heat-seeking helicopters … in an effort to find the beast,” as per the AP.

St. Osyth, a small hamlet of some 4,000 souls in Essex County, hardly seems to have anything in common with an African savannah, although it is only about 20 kms away from Colchester, which boasts 180,000 residents and its own zoo.  One has to wonder how a lion could have made its way 20 clicks down the coast however, especially when the Colchester Zoo doesn’t have any missing.  Alas, Sarah Forsyth, a rhino curator at the zoo, called down to the scene of the lion sighting, told The Guardian that it was unlikely a lion appeared in the pictures taken in St. Osyth. ” I think it was more likely to be a dog. It certainly wasn’t a male lion. It didn’t have a mane.”  On that note, shouldn’t residents still remain fearful of a massive, lion-sized dog roaming the British coast?

In any case, this wouldn’t be the first time that a fearsome predator appeared out of the blue in Britain on a slow news day.  As the AP notes, “In 2011, there was the Hampshire White Tiger, whose alleged appearance near a sports field stopped a cricket game and led to a police alert (the tiger turned out to be a stuffed toy). And in 2007, the British media went wild over a man who claimed to have photographed a great white shark off the coast of Cornwall, in southwestern England.”  (Apparently he was just taking the piss—the pictures were taken in South Africa.)  If this trend continues, well, they’d better be on the lookout for black bears in Blackpool and landsharks in London …