Wait, why is there a lemur running around a North Texas neighborhood?
Sarah Adams, her husband and her 3-year-old were having a normal summer day on June 19 when she saw a raccoon climbing up the fence.
Except the ring-tailed, black-and-gray creature in the middle of her Denton back yard was not a raccoon.
“Your brain is telling you, that’s a lemur,” she said. “But then your brain is also telling you, ‘You’re in Denton, Texas. How is that a lemur?’”
But a lemur it was.
In a video Adams posted to Facebook, the primate confidently strolls across the wooden fence a few yards behind Adams’ toddler, who is obliviously playing in a slip-n-slide. The lemur takes a few steps and pauses, throws a look directly at the camera, then walks to where the fence meets a tree trunk.
“When it started coming down the fence, that’s when we decided we needed to come inside,” Adams said.
She called Denton Animal Services, and posted about the sighting on NextDoor.
“I put it up on NextDoor and was like, ‘Hi, there’s a lemur in the back yard. Does this lemur belong to somebody?’” she said.
Animal Services got to her house about 30 minutes later. By then, the creature was nowhere to be seen.
Dorcas Johnson with Denton Animal Services said an officer responded to the call, but did not see the lemur. This was the first call for a lemur sighting the department has had, Johnson said.
Adams said she found out that a vet living in the neighborhood likely owns the lemur.
Johnson said Animal Services Manager Randi Weinberg is researching whether or not a person can legally own a lemur in Denton.
Weinberg was on vacation Thursday, but told the Denton Chronicle — which first reported on Adams’ lemur sighting — that state law allows people to own pet lemurs if they have a permit. The department was still checking if the person who own the Denton lemur has those proper permits.
Adams saw the creature again a few days ago swinging in the trees of another person’s back yard. She is not sure if the lemur lives at that house or had escaped his owner again.
“My son said, ‘Is the lemur still in the tree?’” Adams said. “Only in Denton.”
