A family who found a crab in a market toilet travelled for five hours just to return it to the sea. Watch here:
The crustacean was found by 12-year-old Arthur in a public toilet in Birmingham Market on 9 February, and he excitedly rushed to get his mum, Melanie Moon, to show her his discovery.
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Little did she know that the find would end up dramatically altering their plans.
The 46-year-old recalled: "Arthur is autistic and doesn't like crowds so we had been working on getting him out a bit more.
"We were planning on going to the Think Tank in Birmingham and I thought I'd pop in to the rag market to pick up some bread.
"Arthur then needed the toilet and went into the baby changing area by mistake. He came out and I've never seen him so excitable! He grabbed my arm and made me go and have a look.
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"There was a little crab legging it around the room and then he tried to hide in the corner."
Seeing the joy her boy got from the crab, she decided to take it home - though she was told by a market trader the little creature would be dead within hours.
"I thought, what should we do? He was smaller than my hand - and we decided to take him home," she said.
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"We went to a seafood stall and asked a woman for a pot but she said there was no point and he would die in hours.
"I thought better to die in our home then in a toilet at the market."
Keen to give the crab the best chance of survival back at the house, they decided to make it a little home - in a drawer, which they filled with sand and salt water - and they fed it fruit. Oh, and they named it Gary.
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Anyway, after a few days, Gary was full of beans.
"He most definitely wasn't dying - he had a real will to survive," Melanie said.
"He had clearly escaped from the live food stall and had it about him enough to leg it off."
But of course, if you love something you must set it free, and they knew Gary couldn't live in a drawer in Coventry forever.
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And so, Melanie and Arthur decided to travel five hours by train to release Gary back into the sea in Devon, stopping by at the market on the way to spend £16 on around 60-80 more crabs for the big crustacean liberation away day.
Oh, and they decided to name all of those crabs Gary too.
Melanie, who had only just recovered after being hospitalised with Covid, was reduced to tears when she released the animals back into the sea.
She said: "It took them a while to get them going - I think they had been frozen to subdue them.
"By the time we released the 'Garys' - it was quite dark. It was so exciting when we let them all go - it actually made me cry."
Topics: Animals
Jake Massey