AN orangutan breaks out of Melbourne Zoo, then, less than two weeks later, another does a runner in Perth ... can any zoo hold Australia’s hairy Houdinis — and why are they going walkabout?

The second question is easy to answer. Orangutans are highly intelligent, and enormously inquisitive.

As for the answer to the first question — why have there been two orang-utan escapes in two weeks — that’s also easy. It’s because they can.

Look at their global history of escapes and it’s pretty clear they’re blessed with plenty of cunning.

One, named Fu Manchu, attracted the attention of Time magazine after a series of escapes from Omaha Zoo in the US.

Fu had an uncanny knack of exiting his enclosure and popping up outside.

According to Time (in an article title Can Animals Think?) Fu’s first departure was put down to human error and the head zookeeper wasn’t happy.

A second escape had him fuming, but during Fu’s third escape bid he was caught in the act.

The degree of genius involved was astonishing.

According to Time, Fu ‘climbed down some air-vent louvres into a dry moat. Then, taking hold of the bottom of the furnace door, he used brute force to pull it back just far enough to slide

a wire into the gap, slip a latch and pop the door open’.

‘The next day’, Time reported, the zoo keeper noticed something shiny sticking out of Fu’s mouth. The shiny something was the wire lock pick ‘bent to fit between his lip and his gum and

stowed there between escapes’.

Another US orangutan escapee was a resident of San Diego Zoo, except when he wanted to be somewhere else.

Named Ken Allen (no, we don’t know where these names come from), the orang-utan developed a cult following among humans impressed with his tenacity.

Ken, according to the Los Angeles Times, managed four escapes in three years.

His final escape came after a water pump feeding the moat around his enclosure clogged up and the moat ran dry.

Ken, doing what orangutans do best, did a runner, wandering down to a footpath near his enclosure and, according to latimes.com, ‘hammed it up for dozens of picture-taking zoo visitors’.

Realising he’d been spotted by a zoo gardener, Ken made himself scarce, heading (not too logically) for the part of the zoo where lions and bears were kept.

That’s where he found himself outnumbered by humans and was chased back to his enclosure.

Orangutans in Australian zoos have also proved themselves experts at escaping.

In 2009, Adelaide orangutan Karta decided she wanted to go out for Mother’s Day.

She built a platform from shrubs and sticks, then used another stick to short-circuit an electric fence and bolted.

Karta, though, had second thoughts, and was trying to return to her enclosure when keepers arrived.

Adelaide Zoo’s curator told news.com.au that Karta had always been mischievous and liked being inquisitive.

“Their nature is they will work on things and she just enjoys building things, unfortunately on the wrong day and in the wrong area.

Orangutan's escape forces Melbourne Zoo into lockdown 11-year-old orangutan Malu forced Melbourne Zoo into lockdown after he used a blanket to escape from his cage. Courtesy: Seven News Melbourne

Earlier this month, Melbourne Zoo orangutan Malu managed to escape his enclosure via hole in the roof.

The 11-year-old used a blanket to help in his breakout, wandering off to the public viewing area where he could look into his enclosure from the outside.

When keepers finally cornered Malu, they used his intelligence against him.

Trained to hold out his arm to receive needle jabs, Malu cooperated as usual — and was given a tranquilliser.

The most recent orangutan escape — at the time of writing — was in Perth, where five-year-old Teliti scaled a fence on Sunday and wandered out among zoo-goers.

Witness Reilly Lovegrove told 6PR that he saw a little girl pat Teliti on the head and ‘a lot of people were wanting to pat it and pick it up’.

Teliti was quickly ushered back to her sleeping quarters.

Her escape wasn’t the first from Perth Zoo — in 2009, 15-year-old orangutan Pulang managed to free a rope from a bolt and swing herself to freedom, Tarzan-style.

Like Karta in Adelaide, she was overwhelmed by the outside world and, after about five minutes, was back in secure custody.

While orangutan escapes have caused plenty of grief for zoo staff, they seem to be generally well behaved when they’re on the loose — at least compared to some other members of the primate family.

Metro.co.uk reports on the apparently infamous case of the Rhesus monkey riot of 1935.

Hadn’t heard of it? No, neither had we, but according to Metro a worker at Frank Buck’s Jungle Camp Animal park in upstate New York left a plank across a moat enclosing a Rhesus monkey colony.

All 175 monkeys exited the park and took up residence in nearby woods.

What was a good story became much better from a headline perspective when it emerged that the lead monkey was named Capone ...