•Police suspected someone was stealing shoes from a children's school in southwestern Japan. But a security camera caught the thief in action. It was a weasel!

•The small animal with a long body and short legs usually hunts for rats and rabbits. But this one was hunting for children's shoes.

•After the children's shoes began disappearing, police put in place three security cameras in the school in Fukuoka in southern Japan. Soon after, recorded video showed a weasel with a small shoe in its mouth.

•“It's great it turned out not to be a human being,” Deputy Police Chief Hiroaki Inada told The Associated Press recently. Teachers and parents had feared the thief could be a person with mental health problems.

•Japanese often take their shoes off before entering homes. The shoes that disappeared were all slip-ons the children wore indoors, stored in special spaces near the door.

•Weasels are known to hide items. People who keep weasels as pets give them toys so they can hide them.

•The weasel moved shoes around and took 15 of them before police were called. Six more were taken the following day. The weasel returned to steal one more shoe. The video of that theft was seen the next day.

•The shoe-loving weasel only took the white indoor shoes made of canvas, likely because they are light to carry.

•“We were so relieved,” the school's kindergarten director Yoshihide Saito told Japanese broadcaster RKB Mainichi Broadcasting.

•The children got a good laugh when they saw the weasel in the video.

•Although the stolen shoes were never found, the remaining shoes are now safely behind netting that covers the storage spaces.

•The weasel, which is believed to be wild, is still on the loose.

•I'm John Russell.

•Yuri Kageyama reported on this story for the Associated Press. John Russell adapted it for VOA Learning English.

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•Words in This Story

•slip-on – n. a shoe without fastenings

•pet -- n. a domesticated animal kept for pleasure

•relieved – adj. experiencing or showing relief especially from anxiety or emotions that have built up

•kindergarten – n. a school or class for children who are usually five to six years old

•netting -- n. material consisting of pieces of string or rope that are woven together