MELBOURNE, Australia — When Australian farmer Rhys Smoker announced he’d found a live frog in a bag of lettuce, his housemates didn’t believe him.
Smoker had been preparing a steak and salad dinner on Saturday for the three people who share his house in Esperance in Western Australia state when he spotted the frog among the leaves inside the sealed plastic bag he’d bought from a supermarket, housemate Laura Jones said on Tuesday.
“He’s like, ‘Oh Bro, there’s a frog in the lettuce.’ And we’re like, ‘No, you’re taking the mick, like that’s not real,’” Jones told AP. Taking the mick is a slang term for attempting to fool someone.
Smoker brought the bag into the lounge room to show Jones and her partner Billy Le Pine.
“Obviously there’s a little frog hiding out and, yeah, we all had a little laugh about it,” Jones said.
Le Pine said they named the frog Greg before releasing it at a pond near the house.
“We thought we’d give him a wee send off tune as we played Crazy Frog for him,” Le Pine told Australian Broadcasting Corp. Crazy Frog is a Swedish CGI-animated character and Eurodance musician.
Smoker and his partner Lilli Ashby had bought the lettuce at a Woolworths supermarket in Esperance the same day Greg was discovered.
Five years ago, a shopper confronted a 3-meter-long (10-foot-long) nonvenomous diamond python on a shelf of a Woolworths supermarket in Sydney. Also in 2021, a shopper discovered a venomous pale-headed snake wrapped in plastic with lettuce in an ALDI Sydney supermarket.
Woolworths said the frog in the salad was an isolated incident and there had been no other similar cases reported. “Our teams are investigating this with our suppliers as a priority,” a Woolworths statement said.
Woolworths apologized to the household and provided a replacement bag of lettuce.
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