After a deadly attack last week by an escaped zoo tiger, residents of the Georgian capital, Tbilisi, are starting to see or hear predator zoo animals everywhere. And coming up with some increasingly fantastic tips for how to survive an encounter.

In one Tbilisi suburb, police and a group of concerned citizens caught what they thought was one of the wolves that had escaped from the city zoo after the June 13-14 flood that literally turned Tbilisi’s center into an urban jungle.

“Trust me, I know a wolf when I see one,” one man assured skeptics in a video of the supposed capture.

“Shouldn’t some zoo representative come?” another asked.

Against a backdrop of police-car lights, a crowd took photos for posterity with the suspected runaway; some even hesitantly stroking its head.

But the detainee proved to be a dog.

It was released and cleared of all lupine charges.

The confusion, however, was not a one-off. In the central district of Vake, several young pranksters downloaded a lion’s roar and broadcast the sound via speakers to horrified neighbors. Before long, both the national guard and police came running as emergency calls flooded in.

“The children and their parents were summoned to the police,” said Interior Ministry spokesperson Nino Giorgobiani, news outlets reported. “We get lots of false-alarm calls, but this one was beyond the pale.”

Such screw-ups have set off an avalanche of pranks and humorous online art related to the hunt for zoo animals. Internet memes rip on Georgia’s famous 12th-century epic “The Knight in a Panther’s Skin” or on a Tbilisi statue, dedicated to a folk poem, that shows a young man grappling with a tiger. Facebook photos show a solo toy lion or tiger lounging near a bus stop.

But to many, still traumatized by the flood and search for victims, such images are less than humorous.

With one tiger and one hyena supposedly missing, the need for a resolution has affected local media, too.

As police scurried to respond to the fatal June 18 tiger attack in Tbilisi, news outlets carried footage of one African flood-cleanup volunteer who arrived on the scene, declared himself to be “the jungle,” and demanded that law enforcement let him try and use a special personal power for putting lions and tigers to sleep.

The man, who is married to a Georgian, was later invited to participate in a TV show to demonstrate his supposed tricks for handling big cats. He declined. It is not, he said, like showing a dance.

But Georgian hunters, now helping the police search for animals, have some moves of their own when meeting a tiger.

“You stare at the animal, lean down like this and pick up some object; in this case, we have a stick,” Hunting and Fishing Federation President Temur Tkemaladze advised television viewers as he acted out the routine. “You keep hitting the stick on the ground, and keep saying ‘Go away, go away, go!’”

Tips in a recent Guardian story from tiger-conservation activist Vicky Flynn, who advised against urinating in a tiger’s territory, got a similarly big laugh from Tbilisi readers.

But, if all else fails, there is a magic word. In a Facebook status update that became an online sensation, one unidentified resident wrote that he had been told by a family member from Africa – reportedly, the same lion-whisperer-turned-TV-star -- that the mysterious word “Ashmalakha” can put a tiger or lion to sleep.

Apparently, some are ready to believe it.

“Stay safe,” staff at one Tbilisi grocery told a co-worker finishing her shift late on Monday. “Don’t worry, I know what to do if I see a tiger,” she responded. “I will say ‘ashmalakha’ and hit it with a shoe.”

