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The animal kingdom fights back

Yesterday's blog about the orca attacking its trainer at Sea World in San Diego got us to thinking: Doesn't it seem like the animals are fighting back a lot lately?

Forgive us if we, uh, bear too strong a resemblance to old Dave Barry columns, but these are actual incidents from actual recent news stories, which we should hasten to add that we are not making up:

Picture
Squirrel -- not in attack mode

  • In Oil City, Pa. -- right there on Allegheny Avenue -- a squirrel jumped a mail carrier. Who knew why fur flew? "Traumatic," the mail carrier reflected. The squirrel was sentenced to the BB gun.

  • As the headline in another daily newspaper in Seattle put it today, "He was naked, on crack and in an alligator's mouth." Here's the tale. From Florida, of course. Nuff said? Maybe, except perhaps this comment on a USA Today blog:
    "If it was pot the guy was on, he would have had a long talk with the gator and none of this" would have happened.

    Picture
    Alligator sans arm

  • Down in Southwest Florida, another alligator apparently spotted a retiree walking her dog, followed them home and started knocking on the door. In a gated community near Bonita Springs, Lori Pachelli found the bull gator with a bloody lip incurred while performing the aforesaid knocking. "He was pretty big, pretty aggressive," she said. Her cocker spaniel, Trooper, is fine.

    As we used to say at the University of Florida, Go Gators!

    Picture
    California Sea Lion -- the face of a killer?

  • In California, sea lions have attacked swimmers and even landlubbers in several recent attacks.
    What gives? One explanation is that they've been eating fish containing some kind of toxic algae, but the other explanation seems more likely given the weird goings-on off in the Pacific the last few years: they're suffering from a shortage of food off the coast, so they're coming inland -- famished.

    Is this where the booger joke goes?

    • Posted by at December 1, 2006 4:04 p.m.
    Comments
    #17851

    Posted by unregistered user at 12/2/06 4:47 p.m.

    Wild animals are not a problem- the biggest killer of humans (mostly women and kids) are domestic dogs.

    http://www.barkingdogs.net/

    Report violation
    #17942

    Posted by Fremont reader at 12/4/06 12:04 p.m.

    Re: unregistered reader's comment...

    Actually, more people die from bee stings than from dog attacks. Any death is horrible, of course. But when you consider how many dogs exist, the deaths are really quite rare.

    See bee info here:

    http://ohioline.osu.edu/hyg-fact/2000/2076.html

    Report violation

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