Need something to brighten your Monday morning? A seal pup’s life basically turned into a Disney movie this weekend when the adorable critter got lost discovered in a Swedish forest, four miles from the open sea it calls home. Don’t worry, though! A good-hearted hunter found the pup and returned it to its home, demonstrating that every once in a while, things just end up working out the way you hope they will.
Granted, being four miles from home may not sound that bad to you and I. To a baby seal, though, being four miles from water and in a forest is basically like being in another universe — a universe full of things with claws, teeth and other pointy bits that seal pups are not well-equipped to deal with because they are seal pups, and are not really well-equipped to do much but a)swim b)flop around helplessly on land and c)make people go “Awwwwwwww.” For a seal pup to find itself in the middle of a forest takes a Joe Dimaggio-grade streak of poor decisions and bad luck.
The pup was found on Sunday by hunter Robert Sandefors, who called police fo advice only to be told “Yeah, I mean, could you take it to a river, I guess?” by authorities. It was at this point Sandefors probably realized that his hunting trip had ended and his…baby seal escort mission had begun? Seriously, there is not a good term for this because baby seals, as we’ve covered, do not go into forests. This is due to the simple though compelling fact that once a baby seal gets more than, say, 100 feet from water, it is no longer classified as an animal, generally falling into the ‘food’ category instead.
Judging by it had left in the snow, it appears the seal pup proved surprisingly capable of getting into the forest by itself, though getting out was another story. Sandefors speculated that the pup had gotten separated from its mother, and then become about as badly as a seal pup can get turned around. Its tiny flippers would have taken it quite a while to move over about two miles of sea ice, bringing it from the sea to the edge of a nearby forest.
Once it got there, the baby seal just kept going, presumably determined that the ocean was going to be, like, right past this next tree, eventually moving two miles further into the forest. Hey, we said the thing was cute. No one claimed it was abundantly clever. Luckily, though, Sandefors was on hand to give the cute creature’s incredible journey a happy ending and make all of our Monday mornings a little less bleak by extension
- This seal is lucky it didn’t run into any Vikings
- The first creatures on land moved a lot like seals — clumsily
- Here’s some of the first footage of tiger cubs in the wild. Of course it was taken by an elephant.
