{"id":391545,"date":"2026-04-10T11:57:08","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T11:57:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/391545\/"},"modified":"2026-04-10T11:57:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T11:57:08","slug":"runaway-wolf-in-south-korea-inspires-meme-coin-and-presidential-concern","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/391545\/","title":{"rendered":"Runaway wolf in South Korea inspires meme coin and presidential concern"},"content":{"rendered":"

A wolf that escaped from its enclosure in a South Korean<\/a> zoo has spent three days on the loose, captivating the public, spawning a cryptocurrency meme coin and even prompting a message of concern from the country\u2019s president.<\/p>\n

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Neukgu, a roughly two-year-old male wolf weighing about 35 kilograms (77 lbs), appeared to have slipped out of the O-World zoo in Daejeon on Wednesday morning by burrowing under a fence, a zoo official said.<\/p>\n

A nearby elementary school was closed as a precaution, while more than 100 personnel, including firefighters, police officers and military personnel searched for the wolf, according to fire authorities and a city official.<\/p>\n

Drones equipped with thermal imaging cameras were deployed, the city official told Reuters on Friday.<\/p>\n

\"Image:A wolf that escaped from a zoo walking on a road in Daejeon on Wednesday.YONHAP \/ AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n

President Lee Jae Myung weighed in on the social media platform X, urging authorities to ensure a safe outcome.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope no human casualties occur, and I pray that Neukgu also returns home safely,\u201d he wrote in a post on Thursday, which was reshared more than 1,400 times.<\/p>\n

The incident in Daejeon, about 170 kilometres (105.63 miles) south of the capital Seoul, has caught the imagination of the public and online communities.<\/p>\n

A meme coin named \u201cNeukgu\u201d has appeared on decentralised cryptocurrency exchanges, including PumpSwap, with a trading volume of about $140,000 in the last 24 hours as of Friday.<\/p>\n

An English-language X community for the wolf has also attracted nearly 500 followers.<\/p>\n

Born in 2024, Neukgu is part of a programme to restore the Korean wolf, a species considered extinct in the wild.<\/p>\n

South Korea has seen other high-profile zoo escapes in recent years, including a zebra that was found wandering the streets of Seoul for several hours in 2023 before being caught.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A wolf that escaped from its enclosure in a South Korean zoo has spent three days on the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":391546,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[61,60,82,263],"class_list":{"0":"post-391545","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wildlife","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-wildlife"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=391545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/391545\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/391546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=391545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=391545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=391545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}