RICHARD H. TRENT’S WALLABIES FLEE FROM THEIR CAGES

Strange Australian Pets of Real Estate Man Escape Into Mountains

Richard H. Trent, Honolulu’s animal impresario, issues a call to all citizens of Oahu today to join in a mammoth, personally conducted wallaby hunt, the first of its kind ever held in the Hawaiian archipelago.

Two of the three small kangaroos which he obtained last week from Australia, at great trouble and expense, escaped from the Trent zoological gardens on Alewa Heights Saturday night and at latest reports last night were roaming at will in the Oahu forests.

Inhabitants are warned hereby that the animals positively are not dangerous; will not bite anything more meaty than grass, leaves or succulent forest shrubbery. The unfortunate owner offers a reward of twenty-five dollars for their capture and return alive.

Unless the animals are caught they may be come permanent denizens of the mountain districts and, like their distant cousins, the Australia rabbits, may propagate and produce eventually a breed of Hawaiian wallabies. But meantime the public would be deprived of gazing upon them at close range and observing the peculiarities of the unusual, antipodean animals.

Mr. Trent’s zoo is practically a public institution, maintained at his personal, private expense for the public’s pleasure, and his loss really amounts to a public deprivation. The wallabies are perfectly harmless, it is said, but they may prove exceedingly difficult to capture.

(PCA, 8/21/1916, p. 7)

Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Volume LIX, Number 10,622, Page 7. August 21, 1916.