Killer Animals. Some animals seem to be harmless and yet some of those can be extremely deadly. Other animals which are dangerous are so hard to kill they seem almost invincible. Take the polar bear for example. I knew someone when I was in the army who was transferred to Alaska. The poor guy was attacked by a polar bear and emptied the entire clip of his M-14 rifle into the beast and yet it still killed him before it died. They claim a bear can live for over 5 minutes even when a destroyed heart. That is enough time to do a lot of damage and a polar bear can be 12 feet tall when it stands. Two male lions killed many railroad workers in Tsavo, Kenya. The men were working on the Kenya-Uganda Railway. Lieutenant Colonel John Henry Patterson was the head of the railroad project and the one who hunted down the lions. He wrote a book about it. What was going on with all those killings stunned the world at the time in 1898. The lions would go into the tents at night and drag out workers. It got so bad at one time the killings took place every day. One of the lions was wounded and the next day began to stalk Patterson at which time he killed it. 20 days later he killed the second one. Sometimes a deadly creature can be really beautiful. Take the Lionfish for example. It falls into this category. The spines on the lionfish contain a deadly venom. Lionfish are popular with the fish tank set. They hide in rocks and many types are comfortable in a 30 to 55 gallon tank. The larger species need a 100 gallon tank or more. There always seems to be disturbing attacks on people by animals. Even a friendly animal can turn on a human. One of the most dangerous animals for humans to be around are chimps. What increases the danger is the fact they look harmless and because of those many don’t realize they have incredible strength and can tear us apart. In 2009 a woman was inside the cage with a friend’s chimp when it turned on her and attacked her. It was a brutal attack in which the chimp ate her hands, eyes, nose and other parts of her body. She survived but was maimed and blind for life. When she was finally gotten out of the cage, the chimp died the next day. I was looking at a list which claimed to have tracked attacks on humans by animals and was said to list the most dangerous ones. A bear in India named the Sloth Bear was credited with making the most attacks on humans, followed by Tigers, Asiatic black bears, Brown Bears, Wolves, American Black Bears, Lions and Leopards. As you may have noticed there seems to be more bears on the list than any other animal. I have always said bears were a very dangerous animal. Wolf attacks on humans are relatively rare but they have happened and can be deadly. Wolves might look like dogs, but the are far meaner. One wolf killed 11 children, 1 adult and injured 19 other people in 3 months and became known as the most dangerous wolf in history and was given the name the Wolf of Gysinge. The attacks took place in the 1820s in Sweden, but we have had wolf attacks as recently as 2010 in Alaska. In a hundred year period of time there were only 16 cases where healthy wolves attacked humans, but there were another 12 cases where rabid wolves did. There was a trainer who had worked with a killer whale at Sea World. The trainer got bitten by the killer whale but survived. This attack happened in 2022. It just goes to show you no matter how close you think you and an animal have become; you are not immune from attack. The Battle of Ramree Island took place in 1945. While the battle was between the Indian Army and the Japanese Army, the Japanese fled into the mangrove swamps and thousands of Japanese soldiers were eaten by crocodiles. This battle is remembered as having the highest number of fatalities due to animal attacks, and the record may last forever. It is said every year over 5 million people in the world are bitten by snakes. Of course, most of them are not lethal. The most aggressive snake of them all is said to be the Saw-Scaled Viper. While about 90 percent of the people bitten survive, the other 10 percent are greater than snake deaths from all other snakes in the world. It just goes to show how vicious this type of snake is. Surprisingly, one is less likely to survive a hippo attack than a bear or shark attack. Hippos are even more deadly than crocodiles. While more data is needed, it seems the chances of dying when attacked by a hippo range from about 30% to a high of over 85%. It is said the chances of dying in a crocodile attack are about 25%. There is a strange bird in Australia named the Cassowarie. They will do anything to get your food and one person was knocked off a cliff by one. It is said one killed a boy in 1926 by slashing his jugular vein when he jumped on the boy as he was on the ground. Another dangerous bird is the Ostrich. The famous singer Johnny Cash had a pet Ostrich. The Ostrich attacked him and he was almost killed. He had two Ostriches on a big plot of land and the female ostrich died of the cold when it wouldn’t come into to a building. It seems this made the other ostrich very angry and took it out on Cash. It kicked Cash in the stomach breaking ribs. His belt buckle saved his life. The bird was given to a zoo. It is not always smart to trust any animal. Even man’s best friend the dog might be having a bad day or a tooth ache. According to an article on Wikipedia, 4.5 million people are bitten by dogs every year in the United States. As we all would suspect, most of them are nothing to speak about, but up to 13,000 people land up in the hospital every year from dog bites. Bites can cause infections and in rare cases this can kill a person. The bottom line is always be careful around animals and some animals humans have no business being around.
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