Pear VideoGetting a pet dog is a great addition to any household – except, of course, when it’s not actually a dog at all.
You see, a man by the name of Tao decided he wanted a four-legged friend to share his home with and had his heart set on a getting a dog.
He went to a market near his home in Shenyang, China, and bought a ‘small dog’.
Pear VideoAccording to Shanghaiist, Tao was ‘instantly drawn’ to one animal in particular, which he believed to be a Pomeranian.
The seller had asked Tao for 1,000 yuan, but after some bargaining, he was able to barter him down to just 300 yuan, and set about taking his new pet home.
Tao quickly started to notice some ‘rather strange things’ about his new ‘puppy’.
One thing in particular, which was an alarm bell ringing for Tao, was the fact it wouldn’t bark.
As the animal grew, Tao was forced to come to the realisation what he was looking after wasn’t a dog at all… it was actually a raccoon.
Unfortunately, Tao’s residential community doesn’t consider a raccoon to be a pet, and he was sadly forced to hand over the animal to the local forestry service, who released it into the wild.
Which is probably a good thing for the raccoon!
If you think mistaking a raccoon for a dog is completely nuts, it’s not the worst confusion there’s ever been.
Two years ago, a family from Yunnan, which is also in China, bought a ‘puppy’ – but it wasn’t a puppy at all, according to Medium.
The family purchased the ‘Tibetan mastiff pup’ on the roadside – and correct me if I’m wrong, that’s already suspicious – and took it home.
Problems soon started arising, including the fact this ‘dog’ kept growing and growing.
Want to know why? Because it was in fact a black bear.
Yu, who bought the bear, said:
The bigger it got the more it started to look like a black bear.
The family were hesitant to call any authorities because they’d grown attached in the two years they’d raised it.
Police in another part of Yunnan province seized a black bear from a man who had adopted it three years before, again believing it was a puppy.
On the flip-side, can you remember when a zoo displayed a dog instead of a lion? Let me refresh your memory…
Back in 2013, it came to light there were some funny goings-on at a zoo in China.
There was a Tibetan mastiff dog in an enclosure at the zoo in a park in Louhe, a city in the central province of Henan.
Only, its cage was marked ‘African lion’, leaving visitors quite rightly unconvinced, especially when it barked.
Elsewhere in the zoo, foxes were in enclosures marked ‘leopards’, and there was another dog in there being displayed as a ‘wolf’.
Best part? Rats were being displayed as ‘snakes’.
The world is absolutely mad sometimes.
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