The wolf got out on to the zoo’s Northern Trail and ran toward the bison and prairie dog exhibits, zoo spokeswoman Kelly Lessard said. The area was evacuated, the wolf was tracked down and then shot by trained zoo staff because it was considered a danger to people, she said.

“The thing about wolves is they are really fast and we have 450 acres here,” Lessard said. “We obviously did not want him to get near any people.”

No people were hurt and the wolf never left the zoo grounds in the Twin Cities suburb of Apple Valley, she said. The incident lasted about 20 minutes, and she said nobody from the public was in the immediate area when the wolf was shot. All areas were soon reopened.

“Our response team was very, very quick,” Lessard said. “It was a difficult decision to make but we had to do it to prevent any injures.”

Richfield resident Mary Woestehoff was at the zoo with her 18-month-old daughter, a friend and the friend’s 7-month-old son. Woestehoff said her daughter, Lucy, was running slightly ahead of her stroller when they saw a group of teenage boys rush past and then spotted the wolf running on the trail ahead about 100 feet away.

“I grabbed (Lucy’s) hand,” Woestehoff said. “There was just those few seconds of disbelief. You don’t really get what you’re seeing at first.”

She picked her daughter up and hurried to a nearby emergency phone box. She said the man who answered the phone reacted as if she were a teenager pulling a prank. She assured him it was no joke.

“Once we realized they believed us,” she said, “we grabbed our kids and headed down the trail to get away from it.”

Lessard said zoo collection manager Tony Fisher was the first to discover the wolf escape. She said Fisher was in the wolf area when the animal got out of its main enclosure through a tear in the fencing and then escaped a backup enclosure.

She said zoo officials were trying to determine how the fencing tore and why the second enclosure, which is meant to stop escaped animals so they can be tranquilized, didn’t stop the wolf.

The zoo said in a statement that a tranquilizer was not used on the wolf because it can take 10 to 15 minutes to fully take effect and can cause an animal to run more and become more aggressive.

“While it is regrettable that this animal had to be shot, it was the appropriate reaction to the situation,” the zoo said. “The zoo’s primary concern is the safety of our guests, our employees and the community in which we operate.”

The zoo added that it was “the first time anything of this sort has happened” there and said it will “redouble” efforts to prevent animal escapes.

Woestehoff said the wolf looked like a “scared dog” and appeared to want nothing to do with the people around it.

“It looked like it didn’t know where to go, like it was just trapped,” she said. “If it had been a cat I would have been a bit more frightened. From what I know about wolves in general they usually try to stay away from people. That was definitely the case with this animal.”

She said zookeepers, including one with a rifle, showed up a few minutes after her wolf alert. Guests were calmly told that an animal was out of its enclosure and they should move down the trail and head inside the nearest building.

The Mexican gray wolf, a subspecies of the gray wolf, is on the federal endangered species list. The federal government reintroduced the wolf to the wild in the American Southwest in 1998 in hopes of re-establishing a self-sustaining population.

The wolf that escaped had been a permanent resident at the zoo, while two others are there temporarily because they’re from a North Dakota zoo that was shut down by flooding, Lessard said.

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Online:

Minnesota Zoo: http://www.mnzoo.org