The other day, a man named Geoff was completing an errand, meandering through a grocery store parking lot in New South Wales, Australia, when he noticed a crowd forming around one particular car.
Geoff walked over and found the source of the commotion. There was a young wallaby trapped inside the car’s grille.
“I was surprised it looked relatively unscathed,” Geoff told Yahoo! News. “But it would have been cooking. There’s no cover in that car park, so it was completely exposed.”
Wallabies are small, kangaroo-like marsupials native to Australia and New Guinea. According to Bush Heritage Australia, wallabies are known for their powerful hind legs and special feet made to grip rocky Australian landscapes.
Onlookers continued to crowd around and take photographs, causing the wallaby to become increasingly distressed. To help keep the wallaby calm and avoid further anxiety, Geoff and other animal lovers placed umbrellas over the car while they waited for help to arrive.
By the time WIRES Wildlife Rescue volunteer Mark Badgery arrived, the wallaby had wedged himself further into the grille. Badgery knew the animal would need to be safely sedated, so he called Byron Bay Wildlife Hospital, who sent veterinarian Bree Talbot to the scene.
Talbot expertly sedated the wallaby. Then, Badgery removed him from behind the grille and conducted an exam. Miraculously, the fuzzy animal didn’t have any broken bones or signs of injury.
Eventually, the car’s owner returned and found chaos surrounding her vehicle.
“She was shocked,” a WIRES representative told The Dodo. “She had not seen anything on her drive to the shopping complex or felt it under the car. Wallabies are smaller than most kangaroos and tend to hop quite low to the ground, so it probably ran under the side of the car while it was moving and then rolled up under the grill.”
Rescuers named the wallaby Arnie (short for Arnold Schwarzenegger — an ode to his incredible strength). Today, Arnie is in care with a WIRES rehabilitator, where he regularly socializes with other orphaned wallabies. No longer trapped in a metal cage, Arnie is freely hopping to his heart’s content.