Pennsylvania man caught trying to smuggle live turtle through customs in his pants

The urge to smuggle contraband through airport security brings out the inner criminal in all of us, but one Pennsylvania native really came out of his shell when he decided to try and smuggle a live turtle through customs by stuffing it down his shorts.

This unlikely incident of turtle trafficking occurred at Newark Liberty International Airport on Friday, as revealed by a statement released by the federal Transportation Security Association. The man in question — whose identity has yet to be revealed, fortunately sparing him a lifetime of online infamy — had his cunning masterplan scuppered when a body scanner detected something “in the area of [his] groin.” He was then patted down by a TSA agent who quickly determined that there was a foreign object hidden behind his flies.

After being questioned about it, the twisted turtle-napper came clean and retrieved a bundle from inside his pants. Wrapped up in a small blue towel was a turtle of about 5 inches in length, which was subsequently identified as a red-ear slider turtle. Native from the Midwest to northern Mexico, the red-ear slider — or pond slider — is the most common kind of turtle in the U.S. and as such is the turtle species most frequently used as pets.

It’s unclear if this trouser-trapped turtle was the man’s personal pet or if he was trying to smuggle it back into the state. What we do know is that the individual was removed from the checkpoint area by Port Authority police and ultimately missed his flight. The turtle was not returned to his possession.

“I commend our officer who conducted the pat-down in a very professional manner in an effort to resolve the alarm,” shared Thomas Carter, TSA’s federal security director for New Jersey, in a statement addressing the bizarre turn of events. “We have seen travelers try to conceal knives and other weapons on their person, in their shoes and in their luggage, however I believe this is the first time we have come across someone who was concealing a live animal down the front of his pants.”

Obviously, there’s only one question we want an answer to after all this: is the turtle OK? Luckily, Carter assured us that the liberated reptile appears to be doing fine. “As best as we could tell, the turtle was not harmed by the man’s actions,” he concluded.

Congratulations have to be offered to our offending flyer here — he may well have achieved the impossible. We thought that woman who gleefully kidnapped a wombat joey from its mother for Instagram clout would be far and away every animal-lover’s least favorite human of the week. And yet forcing a turtle to get intimately familiar with your private parts may just take the take spot.

Still, as much as we sympathize with the troubled turtle’s ordeal, there is another reason why it’s bad to illegally smuggle this type of turtle across states. Red-ear sliders are notoriously invasive species and have a negative impact on ecosystems they are artificially introduced to, on account of their various advantages over other turtle species and habit of spreading diseases and displacing other turtles from their homes. Hold on, do we know for sure the man put the turtle down his pants? Maybe the turtle mistook the contents of his shorts for one of his own kind and was trying to steal its home?