We certainly understand, in theory, why you might want to smuggle a pet onto a plane. You don’t want to leave it behind with a friend, who will probably kill it, and you don’t want to hand it over the airline, which will probably send it to Hawaii or something. And given all that, the plan that one Chinese man hatched to fly with his pet turtle is pretty ingenious.

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He tried to disguise it as a hamburger.

South China Morning Post reports:

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As Li passed through airport security, X-ray screening machines detected a few “odd protrusions” sticking out of a KFC burger that the man had packed in his bag.

Airport staff determined that the protrusions looked suspiciously like turtle limbs, and asked to inspect Li’s luggage.

Now, let’s give Li some credit. A KFC hamburger very well could have “odd protrusions.” And, hey, they might even look like turtle limbs. It just happened that in this case, they were actually turtle limbs.

As funny as this is, we just hope that Li was telling the truth about his motivations — to keep his pet turtle by his side — and wasn’t actually testing out an idea for a new smuggling technique to carry endangered turtle across the border. Or, for that matter, a new idea for what KFC should serve between burger buns.

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