Cape Town – A busy main road quite a distance from the ocean is not the usual habitat of a seal, but it was where a Cape fur seal could be spotted crossing the busy Jakes Gerwel Drive, opposite the Vangate Mall in Athlone on Wednesday morning.
Cape of Good Hope SPCA Wildlife Department received a call about the seal that can be seen in the video nonchalantly looking left and right before he crossed the busy road as though he had been well accustomed to it.
According to the SPCA, Chief Inspector Jaco Pieterse and Inspector Lwazi Ntungele found a large adult female Cape Fur Seal wandering about into traffic while attracting a crowd of bemused onlookers.
The City of Cape Town Metro Police were also on the scene and controlling the traffic to keep the animal safe.
“How did he get here?,” the man taking the video asked bewilderedly.
“Quite how a seal got to be there in the first place so far from the ocean will remain a mystery,” the SPCA said in a statement.
“One theory is that it had swum into a canal and was washed further away by strong currents, or that it was intended to be an unusual Christmas gift for someone’s mother-in-law and then merely dumped when its captor saw the price of fish!” it added.
The SPCA further revealed that ‘Santa the Seal’ had been rescued and returned to her own habitat.
” Either way, Santa the seal (as she was named by onlookers), skipped into the water and swam off with a wave of her flipper, her Christmas shopping will have to wait.”
Watch Santa the Seal crossing the road here:
Seal roaming the streets of Cape Town – N7 Jakes Gerwel Drive pic.twitter.com/YdJTrNSYyC
— SA Trucker (@rsa_trucker) December 21, 2022
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Compiled by Junaid Benjamin
