Kicking off to freedom

– A distressed kangaroo leapt over a 2.2-metre wall at a shelter this week and escaped into a forest after having been rescued from a home he had crashed into in the southern Australian city of Melbourne two days earlier.

The rescuers had named the kangaroo Norman Bates, after the killer in the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Psycho, when they pulled him from a home on Sunday where he had smashed through a window and spattered blood all over the walls.

“There was just blood everywhere. It looked like a scene right out of Psycho,” said Manfred Zabinskas, who runs the Five Freedoms Animal Rescue shelter and was called in by police to retrieve the runaway roo.

Norman was put in a large, state-of-the-art enclosure with other kangaroos but was clearly highly strung and by day two was looking for a way out.

“We’ve not seen a kangaroo so desperate to get out as Norman. He didn’t even touch the top rail at two metres. He jumped pretty bloody high,” Zabinskas said.

The kangaroo probably lived in the open fields near the housing estate where he was found on the edge of an industrial area on the outskirts of Melbourne, and had gotten lost and panicked when he crashed into the home.

“At least he is now in a forest, safe from cars and people,” Helen Round, a volunteer at Five Freedoms, said.

Australia has roughly 45 million kangaroos and it is not unusual for them to be seen in cities. –