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By Ali Watkins
November 6, 2025 — 12.02pm
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-coloured 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?’” O’Reilly recalled.
A photograph released by Ireland’s police force, known as An Garda Síochána, showing Mouse, the dog who was mistaken for a lion.Credit: Garda Síochána
A lion? Here?
The video began spreading on news sites and social media in Ireland, prompting both speculation and scepticism.
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’,” police said in a post on social platform 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 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.
O’Reilly, who runs a private forest-management company in neighbouring County Meath, said he decided to report the video to the Gardaí because of safety concerns.
Police, as perplexed as anyone at the apparent sight of a lion in Ireland, initially asked 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,” 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 teenager before being shot by police.
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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 mid-century. The famed MGM lion, with his luxurious mane, bore the Irish name Cairbre and was born at the Dublin zoo.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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