When Idiots Get Attacked: Wild Animal Maulings

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2006-01-04 12:34pm

Reuters wrote:Animals know stupid when they see it
Wed Jan 4, 2006 8:22 AM ET169

By Ed Stoddard

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African mugger fleeing the scene of his crime hides in a tiger enclosure.

On the country's coast, a woman attempts to be a good Samaritan by pushing a young seal into the sea, believing the poor thing is stranded.

Both people paid heavily for their stupidity, underscoring one of nature's truisms: humans do dumb things around wild animals.

"I blame it on Walt Disney, where animals are given human qualities. People don't understand that a wild animal is not something that is nice to pat. It can seriously harm you," said James Cameron, a South African professional hunter.

The cartoon image of wildlife may have prompted a 49-year-old South African woman in October to try to help a seal which she believed was stranded, allowing her 1-year-old grandchild to stroke the creature in the process.

The seal responded by biting off the woman's nose.

Cape Fur Seals are common on South African shores and many have become accustomed to humans.

They are a popular tourist attraction and can be viewed playing in the sea by Cape Town's waterfront -- which may also give a false impression of placid friendliness.

"Cute" seal pups have also been used as potent symbols by groups such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, further enhancing the animal's "cuddly status."

But they can in fact be dangerous and sometimes attack people who venture too close -- as South Africa's noseless do-gooder discovered to her horror.

Then there was the South African robber who made the mistake last month of taking refuge in an enclosure which turned out to be home to a pair of unimpressed tigers.

He had fled into a nearby zoo after security guards heard the screams of a couple he had just mugged in Bloemfontein, about 400 km (250 miles) southwest of Johannesburg.

Not surprisingly, he was mauled to death by the big cats.

The mugger was not the first South African criminal to err in hiding among zoo animals.

Max, a 200 kg (440 lb) gorilla, won fame in 1997 after being wounded by a terrified gunman who jumped a moat into his space in Johannesburg's zoo while fleeing police.

Max pinned the fugitive against the wall of his enclosure and guarded him even after being shot until police arrived, making him an instant folk hero in crime-ridden South Africa.

Other people don't realize that you shouldn't get between a mother and her offspring -- especially when dealing with the world's largest land mammal.

In April of this year, an elephant gored a tourist to death in a Ugandan national park after the man, carrying an 8-year-old boy in his arms, approached the animal's calf.

"I think many people are just far removed from nature. People who live in cities often see nature as something that is tame and manageable," said Sue Lieberman, director of the global species program for conservation group WWF International.

"And wrongly so. We don't need to tame nature, we need to keep the wild out there," she told Reuters.

Then there are the show-offs.

Lions mauled a South African teen-ager in March who came too close to their enclosure while trying to impress his girlfriend.

The sixteen-year-old, his girlfriend and his mother were having lunch with the lion keeper when he ignored advice and went off with his girlfriend to see the lions in the breeding section of the park just north of Johannesburg.

The boy went into an area off-limits to the public and touched a lion through the mesh fence.

The lion quickly sank its teeth into his arm and dragged him under the fence before the curator came, drove the four adult lions in the enclosure away and rescued the teen-ager.

"It just shows a total disregard and disrespect for wild animals," said Cameron.

The boy was luckier than a couple from Taiwan in 1993, who got out of their car to photograph lions up close at a South African game park -- and who were quickly savaged to death by the beasts.

© Reuters 2006. All Rights Reserved.

This is almost enough to make me recant my belief in evolution. How can people this stupid have been successful in the wild?

Siege · Post by **Siege** » 2006-01-04 12:50pm

They just don't think about it... I know someone like that, she was about to get up and close out of a Safari car to see the lions up and close before the driver and other participants forcefully stopped her from doing so. She still maintains it's "not that dangerous" to go out and touch wild frickin' lions. I guess some people just don't know any better. Bar such obvious examples though, I'd plead ignorance due to an overexposure of Disney rather than actual stupidity... Although the two are difference might be hair-splitting.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2006-01-04 12:57pm

This was evolution in action, not a rebuttal of it. Although human civilization has indeed done a fair bit to alter the course of natural evolution by allowing sub-optimal traits to propagate.

Guardsman Bass · Post by **Guardsman Bass** » 2006-01-04 01:00pm

Did any of these make the nomination for the Darwin Award?

aerius · Post by **aerius** » 2006-01-04 01:10pm

I wonder if animals in South Africa are under more stress than animals in other countries?

WyrdNyrd · Post by **WyrdNyrd** » 2006-01-05 04:12am

aerius wrote:I wonder if animals in South Africa are under more stress than animals in other countries?

Nah, it's our humans that are more stupid...

Adrian Laguna · Post by **Adrian Laguna** » 2006-01-05 04:37am

aerius wrote:I wonder if animals in South Africa are under more stress than animals in other countries?

lol @ Bagdad Tiger thread reference

This is really sad. It's one thing when the woman got too close to the seal, at least those don't have any obvious sharp things sticking out of them (though it's still stupid). However, attacking a fucking lion, which has conspicous claws and teeth quite visible, not to mention it is a fucking predator of animals much bigger than humans... that is so mind-numbingly stupid that I almost feel like thanking the animals for improving our genome.

Post by **Edi** » 2006-01-05 05:01pm

It never ceases to amaze me. Even the seal thing. I've seen seals at a zoo, up rather close too. Seeing them at feeding time is extremely instructive: They take a fish over a foot long and thick as fuck in their mouth so that half of it is sticking out, and one casual brush of the flipper rips the thing in half, because they have powerful fucking jaws and sharp teeth. No fucking way would I let one of those critters get iuts teeth anywhere near me.

People ignoring lions and tigers and such and basically treating them like oversized tame housecats deserve everything they get, up to and including getting killed. Once, when I was much younger and a lot stupider than now, I tried to catch a feral housecat. I did manage to get hold of one of its back legs, and it was a good thing it had managed to get deep enough into a hole where it could not turn around or I'd have gotten myself a deserved asskicking. At a cat show I attended, one medium sized, tame housecat put three people in the fucking hospital when it flipped out (they had to operate the owner under general anesthesia, the two others escaped with only stitches). So my general reaction to the question of "Wanna play with wild/feral felines larger than a housecat?" is "Are you fucking nuts?!"

As for messing with baby animals? The same goes double for that. Moose, elk and deer have no compunctions about killing or severely fucking you up if you get near their young, never mind predators. Anything big enough and/or strong enough to do so will make mincemeat out of you if you go near its offspring, and if it's big enough to drive off lions and whatever else it doesn't like (like an elephant is), it will..

Just to illustrate how seriously you can get hurt even by relatively small animals: My dad got a concussion and almost had his eyes clawed out by a Ural owl (weight 1 kg) in a situation like that. He had one eyelid literally hanging by a thread of skin and a cut one millimeter deeper would have blinded his left eye for good. All that from a single impact, and the only reason he didn't lose both eyes were the heavy duty glasses that he wears, which cover both of his eyes from eyebrows to cheekbones. The glasses did NOT survive that encounter (1 kg of owl, at 60 km/h, into face claws first, you do the math...). He's also had numerous encounters with terns (they have razor sharp beaks and an attitude of pecking first and asking questions later) that left him bleeding from scalp wounds. That kind of thing is part and parcelof being an ornithologist. I can also say that the sight of a colony of over three hundred nesting pairs of terns taking wing and waiting for you to take just one wrong step to give them an excuse to come at you is fucking scary.

People really need to get a clue before they even contemplate going near wild animals.

Edi

Post by **weemadando** » 2006-01-05 05:05pm

Ahhhh... Idiots. This reminds me why I love the majority of Australians - we've lived amongst animals that enjoy trying to kill us for long enough that we know how to act safely alongside them. Or, we've become so good at enduring their assaults on our fleshy, weak, pink bodies that we've become like Steve Irwin.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2006-01-05 05:34pm

At first I thought this was simply a repost of the same article. . .until I read in the article about the mugger who did the same idiotic thing last month. Zoos clearly need better security to keep idiots out of cages, we don't want their stupidity infecting the animals after all.