BELGRADE, February 10. /TASS/. The little lion cub who escaped in the outskirts of the Montenegrin town of Budva has been found after 10 days of search, Aleksandar Dragicevic, one of the volunteers, said on his Facebook page on Thursday.
"Alive and exhausted," he dubbed the video of the found animal.
The search for the lion cub continued unsuccessfully for 10 days. The Montenegrin Environmental Protection Agency said that on Thursday, volunteers, police, and firefighters were joined by large animal specialists from Pristina. In all, more than 70 people were involved in the search.
Animal traps responding to movement within a 10-meter radius were set around Montenegro's tourist capital, and raw meat was used as bait, but no activity was seen near them until the morning. Representatives of the agency used a thermal imaging drone, with the help of which a lion cub was detected in one of the houses under construction in the village of Pobory near the town of Budva.
Earlier reports had appeared on social media about a two-month-old lion cub near Budva, who had escaped from a house in the village of Markovici in late January. According to a spokesman for the agency, Montenegro has had a big problem with the smuggling of exotic animals in recent years, which is very visible thanks to social media. It is the Environmental Protection Agency that issues permit for the import, export, and keeping of animals, but the missing lion cub, according to his information, had not been registered.