The puzzle literally tells you there’s an animal hidden in the question – but spotting where it has been concealed is another matter entirely

Sometimes the most frustrating The 1% Club questions aren’t the ones filled with complicated numbers or strange sequences.

They’re the ones that tell you almost exactly what you’re supposed to find.

One particularly sneaky example appeared during The 1% Club: Kids Special, when contestants were presented with what looked like a badly mangled sentence and asked a remarkably straightforward question:

What do you get if you solve the puzzle below?

Then came the jumble of letters:

CANCYOURFINDOTHECANIMALO
HIDDENDINITHISLQUESTIONE?

Somewhere in there is an animal.

That’s effectively the entire puzzle.

And before assuming it must be straightforward because it appeared in a children’s edition of the show, give yourself the usual 30 seconds and see how quickly you can actually find it.

The kids were playing for something very different

The question appeared in ITV’s special edition of The 1% Club, broadcast on 24 May 2026.

This time, Lee Mack’s studio was filled not with the usual adult contestants but with 100 children aged between nine and 15.

There was another major change too.

Rather than competing for the show’s usual cash jackpot, anyone who reached the end and successfully answered the 1% question could win a two-week family holiday to Walt Disney World in Florida.

By the time this particular puzzle appeared, the game had reached the 20% question.

And the wording itself seemed to provide an enormous clue.

The sentence is trying to say:

“CAN YOU FIND THE ANIMAL HIDDEN IN THIS QUESTION?”

Except there’s an obvious problem.

There are letters in there that shouldn’t be.

Can you find the animal?

This is where it’s worth stopping.

Don’t scroll any further if you haven’t made a guess.

You know you’re looking for an animal.

You know the sentence underneath has been tampered with somehow.

And everything required to solve it is already on the screen.

Thirty seconds.

Go.

Got one?

When the same challenge was later watched on Celebrity Gogglebox, it prompted exactly the sort of confusion you’d expect from a good The 1% Club puzzle.

“Camel” was one suggestion.

“Lion” and “rhino” were thrown into the mix too.

Eventually someone spotted the correct animal.

And the crucial realisation was that you aren’t looking for its name sitting neatly inside the sentence as one uninterrupted word.

@1percentclubitv Can you crack it before the comments do? #The1PercentClub ♬ original sound – The 1% Club

The answer is CROCODILE

Look again at what the sentence is supposed to say:

CAN YOU FIND THE ANIMAL HIDDEN IN THIS QUESTION?

Now remove the letters needed to make that perfectly normal sentence.

What are you left with?

The extra letters have been planted throughout it.

Take them in order and they spell:

C – R – O – C – O – D – I – L – E

CROCODILE.

That’s the animal.

The question has therefore hidden the answer in a wonderfully literal way.

The crocodile isn’t concealed as CROCODILE in one convenient stretch of letters.

Instead, its nine letters have been threaded through an otherwise ordinary sentence, forcing you first to recognise which characters don’t belong.

Once they’re isolated, the apparently messy string suddenly makes complete sense.

The reaction showed exactly why the trick works

The puzzle later resurfaced while celebrities watched the Kids Special on Celebrity Gogglebox.

Their guesses demonstrated the trap beautifully.

Some immediately started searching the mass of letters for recognisable animal names. Camel was suggested more than once before crocodile was eventually spotted.

When the solution was shown, one reaction summed up the difficulty rather neatly: they had expected the hidden animal to be together.

And that’s exactly the assumption the puzzle exploits.

Normally, when somebody tells you a word is “hidden” inside another piece of text, you instinctively scan for consecutive letters.

Here, doing that wastes precious time.

The animal is hidden in the letters that shouldn’t be there at all.

So despite being officially a 20% question in a Kids Special, it’s an excellent test for adults watching at home too.

Because after somebody highlights those nine extra letters, CROCODILE looks almost embarrassingly obvious.

Finding them before the 30-second clock disappears is the difficult part.