A seal discovered in a cow paddock 30km from the coast has caused confusion as to how to got there.
The footage posted on social media on Tuesday showed a big black seal hobbling along at a slow pace in the field at Simpson, inland from the Victorian coast.
In the video, a group of cows can be seen grazing near the seal during a gray and windy day.
Radio hosts Ross Stevenson and Russell Howcroft on Melbourne‘s 3AW were dumbfounded as to how on earth the animal got so far inland.
‘It’s a seal on a farm, how the hell does that happen?’ the pair commented on Wednesday.
The seal was spotted in a field in Victoria, 30km from the coast (pictured) – and had people scratching their heads over how on earth it got there
People commenting on the video of the seal in the paddock posted to social media said it looked ‘exhausted’ (pictured) as it hobbled through the field
One person on Facebook seemed to have an explanation, commenting that ‘he’s most likely come up the rivers and then creeks from Princetown,’ a town on Victoria’s south-west coast.
‘The poor seal looks exhausted,’ another person added, while one more said it was ‘a long way from his home’.
‘New work dog looks pretty cool,’ another person joked.
The author of the post said Melbourne Zoo ‘were monitoring the seal’.
The zoo told Daily Mail Australia that people should give the seal space and the opportunity to return to where it came from.
It comes after a young seal pup was found in a similar predicament in rural South Australia, thought it had been found much closer to the sea.
The juvenile long-nosed fur seal was spotted alone by a farmer just 3km from the coast last month.
Aaron Machado from the Australian Marine Wildlife Research Rescue told 3AW at the time that seals will often appear in odd places at this time of year.
‘For an animal that small, when you walk 50metres away from the water, you turn around and you can’t see the water anymore, so they just keep walking,’ he said.
‘They quite often will go quite a distance from water to relax. Not 3km, I’d say that’s a bit out of the ordinary.’
He said seals leave their colonies at 12 months and go island hopping before turning up out at sea south of Tasmania – and then they return this time of year.
The seal was returned to the beach.
Grazing cows (pictured) were hanging out metres from where the seal was seen