Elephant Seal Shuffling Down a Street, Video: Fact Check

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Video of Elephant Seal Shuffling Down a Street

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Elephant Seal Stranded on a City Street

Fact Check:

A strange video in circulation shows an Elephant Seal shuffling down a street in night hours. Seeing the short video shot in dark, viewers wondered if the ‘unusual’ sight is real or not. It is a real incident explained here.

Elephant Seal Shuffling Down Street

On the night of 5th October 2020, the elephant seal somehow crawled out of sea and shuffled through the streets of Puerto Cisnes, a coastal town in Chile. Weighing around two-tonnes, the elephant seal appeared galloping around the streets and surprised residents under COVID-19 lockdown. However, the sight is not unusual to the residents. The massive marine animal stranded on street returned to ocean with the help of locals, police and sailors from the Chilean Navy. They undertook a night time mission to rescue the stranded creature. They blocked the seal’s path using tarpaulins and led it back into the sea. In the video below, you can see the same.

Elephant seals entering coastal towns are not unusual. Officials explained such sightings of Elephant seals and Penguins are common in the region from August and September. As you can see in the video, onlookers in the current incident cheered the seal as it made its way back into the water.

Hoax or Fact:

Fact.

References:

Elephant seal filmed lumbering through streets of Chilean town