Five French teenagers have been arrested in Bordeaux after they got drunk and decided to steal a circus animal for a night on the town. When they got on the tram system an inspector objected to their furry friend and took the llama off the train, where his night ended abruptly.

The youths had exited a nightclub early in the morning on November 14, 2013, and thought it would be a great end to the evening if they could get a zebra home from the local circus. But the striped quadruped proved too hard to handle.

“We went in and played with the animals,” one from the quintet, named Mathieu, told a French TV channel BFM TV. “We ended up taking a llama (Serge) with us. It walked with us like a good dog would have.”

Obviously the group felt a need to immortalize their night out so they took plenty of pictures and posted them on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. They quickly went viral.

Serge’s adventures in Bordeaux were stopped when he turned out to be a little difficult to deal with on the tram. Passengers reported the llama’s presence to a ticket inspector.

“He moved along the tram and we couldn’t hold onto him,” said Mathieu. The inspector made him get off and tied him to a lamppost.”

This is where events start to get a bit confusing. It’s not clear whether the teenagers stayed on the side of the road with the llama and the inspector, or if they bid their new four-legged friend adieu, but it wasn’t long before the adolescents were picked up by police.

Even though the teens probably broke a long list of laws: drunk and disorderly; drunk and disorderly with a llama in public; drunk and disorderly with a llama in public on a tram… they aren’t facing any criminal charges.

Because their stunt went viral online there’s a Facebook page requesting clemency for the teens, and at the time of this writing it had more than 720,000 likes.

Local singer songwriter Serge Lama (not to be mistaken for Serge the llama) also came to the boys’ defense.

“It’s a joke that ended well. We’re so used to seeing unfunny things whereas this has helped break the ambience of moroseness (here in France),” Lama told BFM TV. “That’s what we need right now.”