🦓 Sero
Grant's zebra (Equus quagga boehmi) · Seoul Children's Grand Park zoo, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul, South Korea
Lives in The Savanna
Sero was born at the zoo inside Seoul Children's Grand Park in June 2019; his name means vertical in Korean, for his stripes. He lost both parents to illness in 2021 and 2022, grew withdrawn and difficult, refused to go back into his pen and once fought a kangaroo. On 23 March 2023 he broke the wooden decking around his enclosure and spent about three hours loose in eastern Seoul, cantering down residential alleys and between stopped cars before emergency workers cornered him in a lane in Guui-dong and tranquillised him. The footage turned him into a Korean internet fixture overnight, with thousands of videos and memes; his partner Coco died in October 2023, and in April 2025 art students painted zebras on his walls to keep him company.
What they do
Breaks into a flat-out gallop with his head thrown up and his stiff brush of mane bouncing, then plants his front hooves, skids to a halt and swings his head round to look back the way he came.
A grieving teenager who solved his problems by going for a very long walk through a capital city
Lore
- ★He was loose in Seoul for about three hours on 23 March 2023, weaving between cars and nosing through street bins
- ★No one was hurt and nothing was damaged; he was tranquillised in an alleyway and vets found him in stable condition that evening
- ★Zoo staff linked the escape to the deaths of both his parents - he had stopped caring even for apples and sweet potatoes
- ★In April 2025 fine-art students from Sejong University painted zebras and grassland on his enclosure wall, and keepers say he now lies down and rolls in the sand more, a sign he feels safe
Helping the real one
No verified way to support this animal exists.
We will not invent one.
Seoul Children's Grand Park is a free municipal park; no donation or sponsorship page for the zoo could be fetched and confirmed.
Where this comes from
- The Korea Herald Painted friends comfort Sero, zebra famous for zoo escape (March 2026) ↗
- Global News / Associated Press Lonely zebra escapes zoo, runs loose in the streets of Seoul ↗
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