Turtle vs. Toilet, a Monster in the Closet, and a Surprise Possum
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Thank you.

And what is actually going on with these acquisitions this year, especially in the AI space? Why are so many big players in tech deciding not to acquire and instead license tech and hire away co-founders? The answer, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than it seems. You'll hear all that and more this month on Decoder with Nilay Patel, presented by Stripe. You can listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. Carrie and Clayton Law live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

I've been a listener for a while, so I was super excited to hear from you. Carrie's a huge fan. Okay. Clayton, you're like lukewarm. Exactly this time last year, they'd hired some people to build a fence in their yard, and they planned to pay the fence installers in cash. Clayton went to the bank and withdrew the money in 50s and 100s. The bank teller sealed it in an envelope.

And so I set it down on the counter and, you know, went to go do something, talk to Carrie, and then came back. And I just kind of had a WTF moment. It was hard for me to process what I was looking at. And then he started kind of panicking, I think. Yeah. It had only been about 30 minutes, but the envelope wasn't on the counter. The money was all over the floor in small, wet pieces. ♪

And Carrie, he yelled for you. Yes, yeah. So we both work from home, and I just start hearing Clayton saying, he ate the money. And I'm thinking, what? What? He ate the money? Their dog Cecil, a hundred-pound golden doodle. Cecil was just standing there over the pile of money, just shredded, consumed. It was just all over the floor. How much money? $4,000 total.

He had never done anything like this in the past ever. And so it was hard for me to process what I was looking at because we used to leave dinner out. We'd eat at the coffee table and watch some TV.

And you could leave, you know, a steak dinner or a cheeseburger or whatever on that table, go to the kitchen, open a bottle of wine, talk for a little bit, come back, and he would still just be sitting on the couch, you know, not, you know, touching it at all. So I was very just shocked that he did this. I mean, he hadn't just kind of torn these up. He'd also eaten the bills.

Oh, yeah. You start to assess the damage and you're like, all right, how much is actually gone? Are there any more cooler-sized bills? And as I'm just going through and looking under his toys and his dog bed, I looked in the water bowl and there was a corner of a $100 bill. It was just like the number is 100 right in the water bowl. And I was like, oh, well, that's great. You were able to wash that down. They called the vet, who said to keep an eye on things.

but that at 100 pounds, they weren't too worried about Cecil. Did you then ask the next question? Are we going to get the money back? Immediately, you know, Carrie is probably one of the most, like, just resourceful researcher. Like, can you exchange this? What's the process? So she's Googling it as I'm just trying to, you know, figure out what our next steps are. But

Later that night, it was like 2 a.m. or something. And you have a dog, so you understand. But it's the proverbial sound of a dog that's about to throw up. You have like a 15-second window before it all comes out. And so I hear that and I snap awake, jump out of bed. I'm like, no, no, no, not on the carpet and just got him on the tile. And he threw up and it's 2 a.m. So...

I'm just like, I'm just going to clean this up. And I grab a plastic grocery bag and some paper towel. And I realized, wow, there's like chunks of bills in here, like a lot. And, you know, I thought about turning the light on and going through it. But I was like, you know what?

I'll deal with this tomorrow. So I just put it in the bag, tied it shut, and then I put it kind of low. But then I was like, wait, I don't want him to get back into it. So I put it really high up on the cabinet. So there was no possible way. And then, you know, the next morning, sure enough, there were like hundreds in there all chewed up and stuff.

And what do you do? Do you just, do you like put it in a colander? How do you clean? What do you do? So luckily we have a utility sink. And so we use that and some Tupperware and just in some like dish soap and just kind of washed it a few times. And by the time I had started that process, Clayton had taken Cecil to go out, you know,

you know, to the bathroom for that morning and was noticing that there were also a hundred dollar bills sticking out of what Cecil was depositing in the yard. And so that was when we realized that to get the rest of the money,

We were going to have to just follow him around for a couple of days with plastic bags. It was, and you kind of, you've seen Dawn soap where, you know, hey, it can clean, you know, oil spills off of penguins and ducks. So we're like, all right, well, if it can do that, I'm sure it can take excrement off of dollar bills. And so it did a great job. Yeah. It was just the process of,

following him around in the backyard. And there was the challenging part was that there were a bunch of leaves on the ground, too. And he likes to poop and then walk and then poop and walk. So I'm trying to keep in my mind, like, where these are so I can go find them. And it was, yeah, lo and behold, just tons of bills in there and enough so that it was worth going through. Yeah. So what exact sentence did you say to the bank?

So first I had called and I just explained the situation and they're kind of like laughing. I don't think they really believed me at first whenever I said the amount of money. I think they probably kind of thought I was joking. And they said, you know, we were able to tape it.

together and have the serial numbers on both sides, we could get it exchanged for fresh bills. So I'm thinking, okay, we're going to have to do this. So we had this like massive jigsaw puzzle of these washed partial bills that I had to put together, which took several hours. And so once we had that all taped together, I took that to the bank with me and

I just remember standing in line. I think Clayton, did you come with me for that? Yeah, Clayton was with me. I remember standing in line and people are there just going about their daily business. And then we go up to the clerk with this plastic bag and we brought gloves for them.

and explained that I had talked to somebody at the bank the day before. They said we could exchange these bills, and they're kind of looking at me, and then I explain what had happened, and somebody in the back goes, oh, that was me you talked to, and so she was laughing and comes over, and I think she was in disbelief by the amount that we had brought in. Do you think that there was something about this money that he...

that this is better than a steak? I mean, did he kind of sense that this was real valuable stuff? So whenever I talked with our bank about this, they were not surprised at all. They said that they have a lot of customers that have dogs that will eat money. They did mention that they've never seen this amount. I think it's, you know, like somebody's dog gets a 20. But they said they think it's because it passes through restaurants and restaurants

it picks up maybe food smells, would be their best guess. I'm not sure, but something about it smelled good enough to take that risk for him. I think that's pretty disgusting what you just told me about the smell of the dough. How much money did you end up getting back? It was around $3,500, I think by the end of it, maybe, you know, give or take, hundreds and fifties.

Did you talk to him about it? Did you try to like show him some of the bills and say no? Yes, we did. I just asked him why. Why did you do that? We were never mad at him. Like, I remember we were watching TV and he's like laying on the couch and he likes to watch TV. So he's watching TV.

And we just all start laughing because we're like looking at this dog knowing that there's a few thousand dollars inside of him and he's just coolly watching TV like it's not a big deal. For the past three years, one of our last episodes of the year has been stories about animals. And it's always one of my favorites to make. Last year, there was a story about a denture-stealing mouse.

A cockatoo named Harry, who snuck onto a cruise ship and was given a cabin of her own. And a cat named Onion, who could find his way into anything, even a rice cooker. He was just perched, like...

kind of half on, half off the rice cooker like a gargoyle and like scooping rice into his mouth. But it was really hot, you know, because it was like fresh rice. But he didn't, you know, he wouldn't stop eating it. So he was like complaining that it was hot while continuing to do it. I now duct tape the rice cooker as well. And as always, the story that's become a tradition. From the New York Times in 1908 about a large dog that the paper described as a splendid Newfoundland,

who rescued a small child who'd fallen into a river outside of Paris. The dog was rewarded with a stake. And then, two days later, another child fell into the river and was rescued by the same dog, who got another stake. It kept happening. Almost every day, people in the area were starting to worry. And then they discovered that the dog was pushing the children into the river himself so that he could claim his reward. The headline read...

Dog, a fake hero. It's that time of year again. Today, stories of animals really going for it. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. This spring in Durham, North Carolina, where I live, someone called 911 and told the operator, there's a noise that just won't stop, and I'm very tired, and I want to know what the heck is going on.

She described the sound as an alien spaceship. Around the same time, in Newberry, South Carolina, the police department started receiving noise complaints about some kind of industrial machine running. The sheriff said they'd also received complaints about a constant noise that sounded like a siren or a whine or a roar, and that some people had even flagged down deputies to ask what was happening.

When officers responded to the caller in Durham, North Carolina, and the complaints in Newberry, South Carolina, they discovered that they were all coming from the same source, cicadas. This spring, for the first time since Thomas Jefferson was president, two types of cicadas emerged from underground at the same time. There were trillions of them. They find their mates by being very, very loud, so loud that scientists who study them wear earmuffs.

The Newberry, South Carolina Sheriff's Office issued a statement that said, although to some the noise is annoying, they pose no danger. Unfortunately, it is the sounds of nature. Here's another story about a 911 call. North Ridgeville Police. Hi, yes, I'm walking from the Elyria train station to my house in North Ridgeville and a random pig just came up and started following me. A pig, you said?

Police Sergeant Demir Kaduzovic was on duty. This was North Ridgeville, Ohio, around 5 a.m. There's a bar nearby called the train station, and Demir said that his first thought was that the caller had been at the bar and had had too much to drink and thought a pig was following him. But Demir and another officer went anyway.

And as we're getting close, we see the guy and he's waving us down and we see a pig right next to him. It started to run. It was just basically trying to like not get caught. So it was kind of running in the same area as we were trying to grab it. Eventually, they got the pig into the police car. It sat in the back seat. The police department put up a Facebook post about what had happened.

They included a picture of the pig in the backseat of the car. The pig is kind of big. It looks to me like it weighs 50 pounds, with black bristly hair. Within a couple of hours of posting it on our Facebook page, the owners called up and they were looking for Zoe. Someone's pet who dug her way out of a fenced-in yard and taken herself for a walk.

In September, a woman on an airplane traveling from Norway to Spain opened her in-flight meal and, as one passenger said, quote, a mouse jumped out. Reportedly, the situation was very calm, although the man sitting next to her told the BBC that he tucked his pants into his socks, quote, so the mouse would not crawl up his legs. The plane made an unscheduled landing in Denmark on

A spokesperson for the airline said, quote, We made a very normal landing, not an emergency landing, which had been wrongly stated in some media, in order to change aircraft and catering, which is a fully normal procedure. All of the passengers were put on a different plane and continued on to Spain. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from Ritual.

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Support for Criminal comes from Quince. Quince makes a very beautiful Mongolian cashmere crewneck sweater. It comes in more than a dozen colors, the length is perfect, it doesn't pill, is very soft, and I just got another one in burgundy for Christmas. I already have the heather gray, and I wear it all the time.

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This is one of those unexpected situations that

It was not on my 2024 bingo bucket list, I'll tell you that. In September last year, Ashley Klass was renovating her 100-year-old home and pregnant with her third child. Her oldest, Sailor, had just turned three. And she ended up, you know, starting to have night terrors. She kept saying, there's monsters in her closet.

Ashley says at the time, Saylor was obsessed with the movie Monsters, Inc. And for those who don't know, Monsters, Inc., the movie, is about monsters literally coming out of your closet. So we didn't really put...

Too much into it because we thought, okay, a combination of she turned three, big feelings. You know, she loves this movie about monsters coming out of her closet. And I'm pregnant. Things are changing. She's starting to see us get ready for our third child. But Saylor kept telling them she was sure that there were monsters in her closet. And she kept getting scared at night. We actually, we got this water bottle that we called Monster Spray.

We just kept it by her bed and said, you know, if you were scared at night, just spray it. It's going to protect you. You know, and my husband got into the closet. She'd point where it was, got into the closet and said, there is monsters in there. And my husband would pretend to like karate kick and fight whatever monster and say, oh, I got him. We're good. It didn't work.

Sailor started sleeping with Ashley and her husband in their room. But she would sleep instantly when she slept with us. Did you at any point kind of think to yourself, well, okay, maybe it's not monsters, but this is a really old house.

You know, we looked at all the different ductwork. We looked at all the different avenues of, you know, what could be making like a weird noise. And so I even, I even got the house blessed because I thought, could it be haunted? I mean, cause there was, she was so adamant and I did not want to tell her it was in her mind. But at the same time, when you're watching a movie that coincides with what you're saying at night,

You know, that was our first instinct, was that there was monsters in her closet from Monsters, Ain't Me movie. And then, around the end of October, she stopped talking about the monsters. And she was sleeping back to sleeping in her room, no issues. Ashley had her baby in mid-February. And then, a couple of weeks later, Sailor started to say there were monsters again. And we had, again, monsters.

We started off with my husband and I doing monster sprites, started with my husband and I doing the ninjas kicking in the closet. We did all those things all over again to, you know, kind of alleviate some of her concerns. I mean, were you kind of thinking, you know what? I'm exhausted. I have this brand new baby. There are no monsters. I might be at the end of my rope on this one with the monsters in the room.

A hundred percent. And then, on the first nice spring day of the year, Ashley remembers that she and her husband spent the day outside with the kids. And I noticed a clump of bees. I pointed to my husband. I said, oh my goodness, it looks like there's a wasp nest outside our attic vent. Ashley called the pest control company, and they came out and said it was honeybees. They wouldn't intervene because honeybees are endangered.

So after a lot of calls, Ashley eventually found a beekeeper who would come over and have a look. He ended up finding with my husband the size of a ballpoint pen cap in the corner of the attic vent. That's how small it was. And said, okay, they're coming into the house. Let me see where they're going, what's underneath the floorboards. And that's when my husband said, that's our daughter's room. Ashley wasn't home at the time.

But her husband called her and put her on speakerphone while the beekeeper headed towards Sailor's room. We had a thermal imaging device that he just connected to his phone to show heat maps. And so bees, he says, they produce a lot of heat, especially if they're honeybees, because they're making honeycomb and they're producing honey.

And then he went into my daughter's room and he went through each panel and he was like, nope, not here, not here. And then he went, oh my God. And it, my husband said it lit up like Christmas. It literally looked like a man was in the wall. And you know, that's the first thing we thought, oh my God, what is in there?

The beekeeper said that that is the highest, tallest honey hive that he has ever seen in his 25-year career. And that's when my husband and I, we realized that that panel that he, my husband sent me that picture, it was right next to the closet. 65,000 bees. And did you immediately think, oh my God, we were giving this kid a fake spray bottle? Yes, 100%. We were like,

Oh my gosh. And you know, how did this happen? The beekeeper said, because it was a hundred year old house, it was just a freak accident because hundred year old homes don't have insulation. It created this huge gap in between each of the wall panels, each of the studs, um, so that it created this huge, beautiful home for them.

He also told them that the reason Saylor had stopped hearing them during the winter was because the bees were dormant during those months. And they started getting ready to pollinate again right around the time Saylor said the monsters were back. What did he do next after you found out where the bees were? So we had him open the wall and it was like a horror movie. The bees just came pouring out.

And they just started dropping honey everywhere in her room. Just imagine, like, if you're outside and it's raining, it would be if it's raining honey. And there was just droplets of honey all over her toys, her books, her clothing, her dresser, everywhere. There's thousands of bees pouring out of this wall. The beekeeper started scooping up the bees and putting them into a box with mesh panels. And Ashley and her husband went to pick Sailor up from preschool.

They told her what had happened on the way home. You know, we, you were right. That was the biggest thing is that we wanted to make sure we told her, you know, this is a, I was right for life. So we brought her home and we, we brought her to the bee box and we said, you know, are those, is that the, is that the sound that you were hearing? She looked straight at us in the eyes and was like, yep.

Like, you guys finally understand me. Yep, this is it. That's the noise the monsters were making? Mm-hmm. Okay. We got those monsters. Bye, monsters. Get out of here. Bye, Winobee. Is she there? She is. Can you say hi to Phoebe? Hi, Phoebe. Hi, Sailor. How are you?

I see the bees. Oh, you're talking about bees. Oh, yeah, we're talking about bees. Do you remember when you heard sounds in your room? Mm-hmm. What did it sound like? Did it sound like monsters? It sounded like bees. Yeah, it sounded like... Well, you were right. I guess it did sound like bees. Well, Sailor, thanks for talking. Um...

I like bees. I'm glad you like bees, Sailor. You were close to a lot of bees for a long time, so I bet you're going to like bees for the rest of your life. Yes. Earlier this year, a rumor started going around that there was a small black bear hanging around the road near my house. I was in a place where there weren't really any black bears, and I was intrigued.

Could it possibly be? I started worrying about my new dog, Eight, going outside. She was only seven months old. I knew she was big, like 80 pounds big, and strong, but not strong enough to take on a black bear. She isn't much of a fighter, except when I'm trying to take the millionth sock that she's stolen out of her mouth. My father calls her Socks. I started being extra careful on our walks. I steered clear of some of the trails in the woods near streams.

I have no idea if black bears like streams, but I figured that's where I would hang out. Then one day, I was walking eight up our road, and a woman yelled out, there's the bear. I panicked. I was looking everywhere. And then I realized that the woman was pointing at eight, who was happily wagging her tail, oblivious to anything wrong in the world. When we got home from our walk that day, I told everyone I'd seen the bear.

How long have you been interested in reptiles? Honestly, most of my life. Patrick McKnight works with reptiles. How many reptiles do you own today? I can't give you an exact number. It's somewhere between 1,000 and 3,000. What? How many are in your house? Yeah, so I...

So in the house, we only have two. We have two little geckos. We have a facility where we breed ball pythons. And so we have a fairly significant number of ball pythons, and then we have the four tortoises. They used to just have three. Big turtle, little turtle, and medium turtle. And then a friend of theirs asked if they could take another one in. The friend didn't mention the size.

He's probably about 180 pounds at this point. He's big. What is the difference between a turtle and a tortoise? In my head, turtles like to get wet and tortoises don't. That's all I know. That is more or less the exact... Tortoises do technically fall under the turtle family. And so if you were to call a tortoise a turtle, it is technically correct. People get a little bent out of shape, but it is what it is. But yeah, basically, if it likes to go in the water, it's a turtle. And if it doesn't want to touch water, it's a tortoise.

Patrick moved the gigantic turtle in with his other three at their reptile facility. But then a tree fell on it, and they had to remodel. He and his wife moved the tortoises into their house. He says the tortoises mostly spend their time walking. He called it patrolling, usually the perimeter.

And if something gets in the way of them walking in the perimeter, they're like tiny tanks and they're not going to slow down or, you know, halt too much. They're going to try and brute force their way through. And so, you know, whether that be a chair or a wall, whatever it is, if it's in their way and they're not happy about it, they're going to try and get through it. And so, you know, you'll see pictures or videos of them, you know, all but walking through, you know, drywall and things like that, just punching their way through because it kind of got in the way.

If both Patrick and his wife were leaving the house, they'd put up baby gates. One day, they came home to find the baby gates torn down. And we're like, oh, great. And we kind of figured the tortoises had broken, you know, had a prison break at that point. Patrick heard his wife yelling. And I was like, oh, man, this can't be good. And I walk in and I see the horror scene. He sent us a photo of what had happened. We couldn't figure out what we were looking at.

There's a toilet on its side, knocked away from the pipes. There's water all over the floor. And little pieces of lettuce. A lot of them. And in the corner, an enormous tortoise. It's most likely one of two things. Either A, he got himself kind of stuck and literally just brute-forced his way unstuck, and the toilet was an unfortunate casualty. Or occasionally...

These guys will see things that are of similar size to them as threats, and they will actually attack them and start headbutting them. I've seen him do it to, you know, furniture outside and boxes and stuff like that. So it's entirely possible that he felt the toilet was an invader in his home and decided to knock it over and beat it up. Toilets can weigh 120 pounds. Patrick says the turtle is 31 years old. They call him Mega Turtle.

A tortoise's lifespan is estimated to be somewhere between 80 and 150 years. A tortoise named Jonathan, who lives on the island of St. Helena, is estimated to be about 192 years old. What will you do? I mean, Megaturtle is going to outlive you. He's going to outlive me. I mean, he's going to outlive maybe all of us. What's the plan? Where will he go?

So fortunately, my wife has friends with a local zoo here in Richmond. And so currently that's where he's going to head. If we pass away, you know, the plan is for him to go live at a zoo. Being in the reptile community in general, though, I have a significant amount of friends that have both the space and the skill set to be able to take care of them. It's an adventure, to say the least. We'll be right back. Support for Criminal comes from GiveWell.

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And of course, podcasting.

Thank you.

And what is actually going on with these acquisitions this year, especially in the AI space? Why are so many big players in tech deciding not to acquire and instead license tech and hire away co-founders? The answer, it turns out, is a lot more complicated than it seems. You'll hear all that and more this month on Decoder with Nilay Patel, presented by Stripe. You can listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

Anything you can find in the wild in the UK, we treat here at the hospital. We take in lots of hedgehogs, lots of different birds, foxes, badgers, deer. Steve Smith and Louise Brown work at one of Europe's largest wildlife hospitals. It's in southeast England, near Oxford. It's called Tiggy Winkles Wildlife Hospital. That's quite a name for a wildlife hospital.

Yeah, Miss T. Winkle was one of the Beatrix Potter characters, so a very, very famous hedgehog. And the hospital started off looking after sick and injured wild hedgehogs, so I think that's where we got the name from way back around 45 years ago. Wait, there were enough sick hedgehogs that it could create a whole hospital? Yeah.

Well, we certainly see lots of hedgehogs. How many have you counted before, Louise? Well over 300 at any given time. They're much-loved wild animals in the UK. Today, people find and bring in all kinds of wild animals, and the hospital treats them for free. Steve is the veterinary surgeon at the hospital, and he's performed surgery on everything from a bat

to a toad with a broken arm. Yeah, he had a badly broken forearm. So luckily I have a small plating kit where he was able to use this absolutely tiny equipment, these microsurgical tools, to be able to put this toad back together again. And, you know, this toad then just happily was implanted in his forelimb. The hospital is busy. They're usually treating more than a thousand different animals at a time.

One day, they got a call about what Steve calls a strange large orange bird.

And they found it by the roadside and they were sort of didn't know what it was. They're wondering whether they should pick it up. He didn't look particularly well. He was sort of stranded by the roadside, not flying away. And so we had the call and it sort of came down to the clinical team, to the veterinary team and saying there's an exotic orange bird. And

To my knowledge, there's certainly no exotic wild orange birds in the UK and even escaped pet birds. Orange is not a very common color for a bird. So it sort of made us scratch our heads a little bit, but we were kind of like, no problem. If you can catch the bird, fine, then bring it along and we'll have a look.

But you're thinking, I have no idea what a big orange bird in England, what could this be? We had no idea from the phone call for sure. So it was quite exciting. It was quite a stir while we were waiting for it to arrive at the hospital. So no, we were all sort of taking bets and discussing what it could be.

The person who had found the sick bird managed to catch it. They caught the bird up in their jacket, put it in their car, in their car boot, and then drove it straight to the hospital. And what happened when it arrived?

The triage nurse, we have a nursing team that were on triage, they went down to the reception and grabbed the coat, brought it down to the triage room. And so when we opened up, this bird flapped out, perfectly fine and bright. And indeed, it was a really large orange bird. But very quickly, we realized, actually, this is a herring gull.

So this is one of our normal gulls that we have, one of our large gulls. And this is a herring gull covered in this orange substance. And it smelled familiar, like curry. Yeah, it's a really strong smell.

When we touched the bird and you got this powder on your fingers and sniffed it, you could tell it was obviously the bird's smell, not the jacket or anything. That smelled like curry? Yeah, the whole hospital smelled of curry powder. You came through the door and you felt like someone was cooking, so it was really pungent. The herring gull is one of the most common types of seagulls in the UK. They're always grey and white with black wing tips. How do you think he got covered in curry?

Well, that's a really good question. We were discussing that ourselves. So we assumed maybe a big catering plant or one of the big factories that make crisps or curry or seasoning. And they have these big drums and we think a drum may have been left uncovered and he probably got trapped in there. And in the process of trying to get out, this got completely covered in the powder. Hearing goals are what the British Trust for Ornithology calls opportunists –

They prefer crabs, but will eat almost anything they find. They named the bird Vinny. Vinny was perfectly healthy, just needed a bath. Yeah, the bird was bright, was alert, didn't have any gastrointestinal signs, and was clearly behaving normally despite some sort of misadventure previously.

So we have a washing protocol and you bath them in a nice hot bath with washing up liquid. And basically you have to sit there for probably 40 minutes to an hour washing each feather to try and get the substance off. And so you sort of do that as long as the bird tolerates it. Seagulls, are they friendly birds? Yes.

They are not friendly birds. They probably have the most attitude of any of the birds we see. So especially herring gulls, which is one of our bigger types of gull. A herring gull can be about 26 inches long. And when it flaps its wings, the wingspan can be close to five feet.

He didn't enjoy his bath, so it certainly gave us quite the runaround when we were trying to do it. You should see the injuries on the hands from him nipping the nurses and us from the bath. One bath wasn't enough. They kept him at the hospital, and over the next couple of weeks, they had to give him a bath every two or three days.

Steve says that anything on a bird's feathers can interfere with their natural methods of waterproofing and insulation. By the sixth bath, he did not appreciate it any more than the first and was learning all the tricks to try and avoid us. Seagulls are smart. At least one type of gull is able to solve puzzles, like pulling on a string to get a piece of food. And they will sometimes tap their feet on the ground fast, mimicking the sound of falling raindrops.

because the sound brings worms up to the surface where the gulls can easily catch and eat them. They drove Vinny to a lake and got him out of the car. He was in a dog crate and kept trying to break his way out with his beak. They walked for a few minutes and stopped by the lakefront. Then they opened up the crate and Vinny took off. Ready, steady, go. Go on, Vinny. Woo! Off he goes.

In March, at a different animal rescue in England, the Lower Mosswood Nature Reserve and Wildlife Hospital, a woman brought in a baby hedgehog she'd found on the side of the road. A baby hedgehog is also called a hoglet. It's not a good sign to see a hedgehog out during the day. The woman wanted to help.

She took the hedgehog home and put it in a box with some newspaper, a hot water bottle, and a little dish of cat food. But it didn't move all night or touch the food, so she brought it to the animal rescue. The staff opened the box and immediately knew it wasn't a hedgehog. It was the furry gray pom-pom from the top of a hat. The doctor said the woman took the news very well and had just wanted to help.

Last November, Brett Ingram had just started a new job near Dallas. She says the first couple of days were stressful,

And she got home late on her second day. So I came in the house. I still had my work stuff and I was going over what I had done for the day. I sat on the couch immediately, still in work clothes. And I was in complete quiet. It was, I didn't even turn the lights on yet, really. I just sat down and was on my computer. The Christmas tree light was on though. The Christmas tree was lit up. And I was just sitting there working, looking at my computer. And I heard a little sneeze.

And, you know, I do have a lot of animals. What type of animals? I have two ball python snakes. I have a bearded dragon and I have three dogs and a porch cat. So I thought maybe the cat was under the tree laying down or something. So I kind of looked over there, kind of looked, but didn't look too much and then just kept working.

And after a few minutes, I heard it again, but it was a lot louder. Another sneeze. So I kind of stood up and started looking around the tree. And like, it's in between my two couches and by the window. So I kind of looked in the window seal. And I was like, there has to be something over here. And as I was looking, I looked to my left where the tree was. And it's pretty close up against the wall. But I saw a very long tail.

Then she looked up, and she says she saw a large breathing ball of gray fur. What did the face look like?

It was a possum. Brett called a wildlife rescue person to come help, who told her she didn't do night calls. What? It shouldn't bite you.

Yeah. I mean, I don't know much about possums, but I do know that they have teeth. They do. And they have big teeth. You know what I think I would have done?

I would have gotten my animals and would have barricaded ourselves in a room until that wildlife rescue would open up the next morning. Oh no, we wrestled. I had to get him out. You know, I worked my way in there and trying to like just grab around his body and try to like pull him a little bit to see if he'd come out. But they have hands, like they have thumbs and everything. So he was holding on to one of the branches pretty good. And so when I was trying to pull him, he was holding on and ornaments were going everywhere. So eventually I ended up

pulling hard enough to get his hands off. Like I had to like pluck his fingers from the, Oh my God. And, um, he, it wasn't a very hard fall or anything, but he did like wrestle around and it was like where he, I didn't have him and he, he flopped to the ground and then he ran under my couch and then it became this whole escapade of me having to get him out. So I would move the couch and then he'd run behind the tree under the other couch. And I moved the couches like four or five times, like trying to get him.

And then he ran, I mean, I was out of breath, and he ran back under the bigger couch, and I took like five minutes to like catch my breath. And as I'm doing this, my dogs are just watching me. They have like, they don't, they want nothing to do with it. She says that eventually she was able to grab him.

Like, I guess they secrete this smell for defense. And so that's the first thing I noticed. And I kind of just talked to him. I was like, you smell bad, buddy. You have to go back outside and, like, try to calm him down a little bit. You tried to calm him down. So you held him for a second? Yeah.

I did. He was like, I could tell he was scared. He wasn't hissing or like trying to bite me, but his mouth was kind of open. So like I just like sat there for a second and like I walked to the door and I sat him down and like he scurried off. How did you smell once you put the possum down? Yeah, I had a hoodie on and it was definitely, it smelled like it. I think I threw it away.

Brett says she saw him again a few days later near her porch. And I think how he got in was I have my cat lives on my porch primarily and I have some cat food next to the front door. And I think that one night when I opened the door, he was probably eating the food and just thought it would be nice to go inside because it was cold out. And made his way into her Christmas tree where it was warm. Well, Brett, I want to thank you very much and I wish you good luck this year with no animals. Thanks. Yeah, we'll see.

Criminal is created by Lauren Spohr and me. Nydia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane. Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com.

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