Almost a year ago, unwitting New Year pub drinkers in Hanham learned the answer to a bad joke when a seal wandered into the bar, but thankfully there was no punchline about "breaking the seal", or flipping out over prices, just a very friendly and curious seal making friends with pub punters.
Though the staff at the Old Lock and Weir attempted to detain the seal with milk crates, he was a bit of an "escape artist" and proved a handful until the RSPCA arrive to rescue the young seal. This tale of an escaped seal topped the RSPA's list of its best rescues of the year, alongside a previously unknown story of a fox saved from strangulation on a Bristol farm.
Nacho, the young seal who made a bid for dry land, was taken to RSPCA West Hatch in Somerset where veterinarians found that the six-month old seal was underweight and injured, having trekked 300 miles from Scotland in just over two months. He had an ID tag on his flipper showing that he was taken in by the Scottish SPCA in the summer, the RSPCA said, and released into the wild in November but has "lost lots of weight since".
