A stuffed toy unintentionally caused reports of an escaped monkey.
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Visitors were alarmed when they heard that the creature had escaped from Blackpool Zoo, but it was all part of a planned drill to test the response of the zoo if an animal actually did escape.
A zoo spokesman said: ''If you were in the zoo yesterday, you might have heard reports that we had an escaped animal. We can now confirm that the rumours are true and we did deal with a situation regarding an escaped monkey.
''Luckily in this case, the monkey was of the soft toy variety and the situation had been orchestrated by our health and safety manager. In the same way schools and businesses run regular fire drills, we run regular animal escapes to test our response in the unlikely event one of our animals does escape its enclosure.''
Blackpool Zoo confirmed that nobody had been harmed during the process, but the stuffed toy was a little grubby.