At the beginning of July 2023, a video of animals running down the street circulated in the media and blogs. It was alleged that the video captured Paris, and the animals were released from the local zoo by rioters. We decided to check if this is true.
On June 27, in the Paris suburb of Nanterre, a policeman shot 17-year-old Nael Merzouk, who was driving the car. After this, large-scale riots began in the French capital, and then in other large cities, which were accompanied by clashes with the police. Protesters set fire to cars and shops and built barricades. In this context, a 32-second video with animals allegedly released from a zoo in the French capital began to circulate. Videos of zebras, lions and elephants appeared in the media and on blogs. Among Russian publications, in particular, they wrote about this “Moskovsky Komsomolets", "Moscow 24" And "Arguments and facts" Telegram channel post "Live broadcast» viewed by 784,000 people; In total, on July 1 alone, according to the TGStat service, such publications reached almost 12 million users of the platform. The video and its fragments were also distributed by users YouTube, "VKontakte" And Facebook.
The video, which has gained the most popularity in the Russian-language segment of the Internet, consists of three episodes. The first part of the video shows a zebra running along a road next to cars. This video first appeared in Twitter long before the 2023 protests, namely April 11, 2020. The day after its publication, Le Parisien toldthat a zebra and two ponies that had escaped from a local circus were spotted between the Parisian suburbs of Chenevières-sur-Marne and Champigny-sur-Marne. Huffington Post subsequently found outthat the circus was located in the neighboring town of Ormesson-sur-Marne. The circus owner told the publication that the animals ran away for no more than 15 minutes and then returned home. Neither the zebra nor the pony were harmed.
The second part of the video being distributed is allegedly footage of lions on the streets of Paris. However, this video, as Libération notes, appeared on the Internet even earlier than the previous one. In a video uploaded to YouTube February 12, 2020, it is claimed that in Saint-Denis, a northern suburb of Paris, lions are "walking down the street without any supervision." At the same time, in February 2020, there was no news about lions breaking free in the French media, and due to the poor quality of the video, it is not possible to establish where this is happening. In any case, the video appeared three and a half years before the recent protests.
Neither we nor our colleagues from the agency’s fact-checking division were able to identify the third part of the video, in which the elephant was the hero. Reuters.
Other videos have also spread abroad, allegedly depicting animals that protesters released from French zoos. Apart from lions and zebra, rhinoceros and wild goats are also seen in the video. Fact checkers from Correctiv, Lead Stories and other publications proved that these images also have nothing to do with the protests in France in the summer of 2023.
The Paris Zoo denies that any animals escaped during the protests. The representative of the institution, Mathieu Descombes, said: Reuters, that all the videos that are distributed on the Internet have nothing to do with the Paris Zoo. According to him, not a single animal escaped from any of the Zoological Park, none of menagerie at the Botanical Garden.
Cover photo: social networks, screenshot “Verified”
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