(CNN) -- Could you catch a wild gorilla? What
about a person dressed as a gorilla?
This week, staff at Tokyo's Ueno Zoo practiced
capturing escaped animals by chasing around
one of their colleagues wearing a gorilla suit.
Visitors gaped as scores of helmet-wearing
keepers surrounded the "gorilla" with cars and
nets. Staff then pretended to tranquilize their
coworker, who swooned dramatically and
collapsed to the ground.
The acting ape was immediately wrapped in a
large net and hauled away on a truck.
The escaped animal drill at the Tokyo zoo is
conducted every other year, and this time
zookeeper Natsumi Uno was chosen to wear
the animal costume.
"In our work there may be times when we need
to capture an animal, but we would never be
the ones being captured," Uno told reporters.
"So I tried to feel what an animal might feel
and realized when they were on the run they
would be scared. That's how I felt."
But some onlookers were barely moved. One
Japanese user posted on Twitter, "Ueno Zoo's
escape drill wasn't tense at all."
Another wrote, "The gorilla escape drill was so
laid back! Made me laugh."
The practice is part of the city's earthquake
preparedness drills, where city workers prepare
for scenarios that may occur in the event of an
earthquake.
That includes capturing raging beasts.
In the past, the Ueno Zoo has tried using
different animal outfits: In 2004, two men ran
around the zoo while wearing a giant papier-
mâché rhinoceros over their heads.
The technique isn't just Japanese -- in 2012,
the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston,
Massachusetts practiced capturing an
employee in a giraffe costume. The year before
that, zookeepers in China "caught" a man
dressed as Tigger from the "Winnie the Pooh"
cartoon.
Of course, real animals are more difficult to
catch.
When an actual monkey escaped from the
Ueno Zoo in 2010, it took six hours before
officials finally netted it in the basement of a
neighboring restaurant.
Link.