The police in New Haven, Conn., found a young seal wandering the streets and aided in its rescue. “Maybe we should just start keeping mackerel in the cruisers,” one officer suggested.
By Christine Hauser, New York Times
It was an unusual 911 call on a Sunday afternoon in New Haven, Conn. At about 2:30 p.m., in a neighborhood full of auto shops, an IKEA and renowned pizzerias, someone reported that a seal was “running back and forth” near a bridge underpass.
When officers from the New Haven Police Department responded, there was the seal, flat on its stomach on a cold, snow-encrusted street in the city’s industrial zone.
No one knows how the seal, a gray male only a few weeks old, wandered so far from its natural ocean habitat. But in a city proud of its pizza scene, some joked it might have been drawn to the specialty slices made in coal-fired ovens. There is even a local specialty that would probably get its seal of approval.
“It was looking for clam pizza,” said Officer Christian Bruckhart, a spokesman for the New Haven Police Department.
“We deal with some weird stuff all the time, but this is certainly out of the ordinary even for us,” he said. “Maybe we should just start keeping mackerel in the cruisers.”
Though the pizza explanation is amusing, there’s a more likely reason for the seal’s appearance in the urban world. This is the start of “seal season,” explained Allison Tuttle, the chief zoological officer at Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Conn., a town with its own pizza lore because of the Julia Roberts movie “Mystic Pizza.”
Though the pizza explanation is amusing, there’s a more likely reason for the seal’s appearance in the urban world. This is the start of “seal season,” explained Allison Tuttle, the chief zoological officer at Mystic Aquarium in Mystic, Conn., a town with its own pizza lore because of the Julia Roberts movie “Mystic Pizza.”
Read more about seal season here
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