John O’Reilly, a forest manager in western Ireland, could hardly believe his eyes when he saw the grainy video on his phone, sent to him by a truck driver. There, slinking through the woodlands of County Clare, in Ireland, was the impossible: A stocky, tan-colored animal with a shaggy mane and tufted tail, lumbering into the trees and then out of view.
“You’re saying, ‘Christ, that couldn’t be what it looks like,’” recalled Mr. O’Reilly.
A lion? Here?
The video began spreading on news sites and social media in Ireland, prompting both speculation and skepticism.
After nearly a week, Ireland’s police force, known as An Garda Síochána, solved the confounding case. The creature was no apex predator.
It was a shaggy Newfoundland dog. Its name? Mouse.
“Gardaí from Killaloe have concluded that the recent video of a ‘lion like’ animal roaming around the woods in East Clare is in fact the very friendly dog named ‘Mouse’,” the police said in a post on X, along with photos of a calm, docile dog, whose shaved fur resembled a lion’s mane and tail.
(Despite the proximity to Halloween, it’s still unclear why Mouse had been groomed to look like a lion. Vets do not recommend shaving water dogs like Newfoundlands, whose coats protect them from the elements).
It is the amusing end to a saga that Mr. O’Reilly said began weeks ago, when construction crews and workers in the East Clare area noticed a large animal moving among the trees. They assumed it was a deer, or a trick of the light, he said.
And then came that video, from the truck driver.
Mr. O’Reilly, who runs a private forest-management company in neighboring County Meath, said he decided to report the video to the Gardaí because of safety concerns.
The police, as perplexed as anyone at the apparent sight of a lion in Ireland, initially asked Mr. O’Reilly if it could have been made with artificial intelligence, he said.
The video could’ve been “everything from a dog, to a wannabe Al Pacino in Scarface keeping an animal in the woods to protect his grow house,” Mr. O’Reilly said of the possibilities he considered — adding that it wouldn’t be the first time an exotic animal was found roaming the island.
It wouldn’t even be the first lion — in a 1951 incident that is now island lore, a lioness escaped from a lion tamer’s home in Dublin, where it was once legal to keep the large cats. The lioness mauled a city teenager before being shot by the police.
Lions have not inhabited the European continent in thousands of years. But the Irish, ironically, once cultivated a reputation for breeding the captive wildcats, which were marquee items of many circuses and shows in the midcentury. The famed MGM lion, with his luxurious mane, bore the Irish name Cairbre and was born at the Dublin zoo.
Ali Watkins covers international news for The Times and is based in Belfast.
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