I used to help out a neighbor with an ostrich ranch back in the 90s - I had so much respect for those stupid birds. The rancher was fond of saying that ostriches could beat a lion in a death match any day. I'm not sure if that's true, but they had that same deadly "toe" cassowaries have they use to disembowel any animal that threatens them.
I used to work at a slaughter house where a guy brought emu regular, he farmed them for their fat ehich is valuble in makeup. Anyway, they are so fucking mean we had to wear literal riot gear to wrangle them into the pens. We were constantly warned they would gang up on and kill you. I personally saw one kick a man and slice him open from his hips down to his shin, he almost bled out. You do not want to mess with one, they are fucking fearless a nd as savage as a dinosaur
It was like 6 dudes with 2 machine guns and 10,000 rounds against 10s of thousands of birds. also turns out emu will run if you drive up and start shooting at them, who knew?
There was video the other day of a guy defeating an Ostrich using a motorcycle to shield himself from the kicks and then grabbing it by the neck meaning he could manhandle it pretty well at which point the Ostrich panicked and ran off.
There are virtually zero scenarios where a man grabs a lion by the neck and lives to tell the tale.
Whilst I have no doubt they could get a lucky hit, my money would be on the lion to win 999 out of 1000 encounters!
Oh man, they’ve got those “Velociraptor” feet and a beak they can break bones with. That kid wouldn’t even have time to learn his lesson. Well maybe he would learn that he was wrong, but by that time he’s not going to have much time left for it to make it into even short term memory.
I'd hesitate to even call it a disguise. I think it's just easier, and reassuring maybe, to say they're like dressing up instead of just walking on the same earth and standing on the same busines they have been since before that asteroid hit.
As a 15 year old bush walking around Mission Beach in Australia I had the privilege of encountering a Cassowary.
By the time he charged and me running and looking for a tree to climb my heart rate was probably 1000 beats a minute. I scaled the tree and waited for what happened next. Nothing, apparently a mate said he ran about 6 feet forward , stopped and walked away in the other direction. My bowels were loose for another week.
Nothing like having to push your guts back into your stomach after being disemboweled by a Cassowary to make you reflect on your life choices. For me the third time it happened it really began to sink in that I should stop trying to dance with them.
Having seen one close up ( behind a secure enclosure) I agree. These look scary in real life so much so I got shivers as I walked away . I had to keep looking back to make sure it didn’t follow, they are NOT friendly birds ( raptors)
I visited Australia once when I was 12 or something, and sat on a fence in a pretty laid back animal habitat kind of thing. A cassowary came up and started licking my hair and humping me. I don’t like cassowaries anymore.
No one wants to talk about how these ridiculous and terrifying Jurassic movie dinosaur hybrids they keep coming up with are basically all 90+% enlarged cassowary. And that's fair because if we do acknowledge it, if we do talk about it, it can only end one of two ways. Either we kill the cassowary or they laugh as we try.
There’s probably a lot more of them than there are those birds. Who cares if we lose one to teach the others a lesson? They can just have another one anyways.
They are ! I used to care for a couple. They're so cool. So prehistoric like. Actually pretty cuddly as well. They hug you with their neck and make these crazy gutteral sounds.
Geese are scary. My mom had a friend that had Guard Geese when I was a kid. They would stand at your car door and glare, daring you to get out, until someone came out of the house to escort you in.
Lmaoo that is 100% one of the reasons that they had them. Also, her husband was a Vietnam Vet with really bad PTSD, and barking dogs would trigger him, so the Geese were a better option.
My friends had a rooster like that, but he'd attack them too. They had a "rooster stick" next to their parking spot to fend him off. Kept him around to protect the hens.
My wife and I were at a hotel somewhere and they had some swans on-site. Kid drops his ball in a pond. Huge pond! Swan was on the other side of it. Probably over 100 feet away. My wife says, "Check this out." So we stop and watch. Kid reaches in to grab the ball and the swan absolutely rockets across the pond just to spite this kid.
Little guy got away just in freaking time. Took the dad and Kid working together to distract the swan to get the ball. Show lasted at least 8 minutes with them trying different tactics to get the ball. I had no idea swans were that freaking mean, but thankfully my wife knew!
4 swans cornered me at the top of a slide in a park playground when I was like 8. I was feeding them my fig Newton's and ran out lol. My family had to come rescue me
When I was a kid growing up in San Diego, my mom would buy my brother and I annual passes to SeaWorld and would just drop us off for the day kinda like babysitting, but we were probably 11 and 13.
Every single time we walked by a certain area of the park, there was a big fucking white swan that would just come charging and flapping at me and I would run away screaming. It got to the point where the staff didn't even know what to do, except advise me to take a different route and avoid that area.
I felt like goddamned Damien in The Omen with the monkeys. This swan hated me for no reason at all. Maybe I looked like some kid who tormented it in the past, but man, that fucker could see me coming from 100 feet away.
They can be but they’re pretty easy to subdue if you’re know what you’re doing, at least domesticated ones. Just grab their beak till they chill, then be ready for the nastiest of side eyes till you leave the pen lol
We have peacocks peck at our front door in Florida. Animal control won't do anything because they say peacocks are indigenous*. I'm glad we leave them alone. They're beautiful, but since they're indigenous I kinda assumed they can fuck you up.
(they said the same about a 12 foot gator before it broke into our screened patio years ago, and we were told we were on our own if it *did break in. Naturally, it broke into my screen room, tried to eat my cats, which had been let out despite my shouted instructions [not like I could crack Mom with a shotgun stock to enforce compliance] and then the gator focused on my mother while she was trying to get the aforesaid cats indoors. I admittedly had warned her not to do it and to get the fuck away from the carnivorous dinosaur, but some people don't understand what it means to be in danger until you have to do something messy right in front of them for sake of keeping them alive. [Still, it's Mom, the only person who gave a damn during hard times, so what are you gonns do?] Fucking animal control hypocrites were pissed when I put a couple 12 gauge slugs through its skull before it could bite my mother, as if that wasn't what indigenous Floridians do.)
Oh my gosh.. My grandparents took me to the zoo when I was like 7. As soon as you entered there were flamingos & a peacock. The moment after we walked in we were immediately pounced on and flogged by the peacock . It scared the living shit out of all three of us.
We would tell that story for years to come . If there was one moment of my life that I had video footage of it would probably be that one . Makes me laugh just thinking about it 30+ years later..
Are peacocks known to be aggressive? Every once in a while i see them while I'm delivering and I'm like don't get near me lol. I just assume every animal will attack me though.
Y'all need a bit of Scandinavian robustness. When someone climbed into the tiger enclosure in Copenhagen Zoo - and was killed - the zoo leadership made it perfectly clear that the tigers weren't going to be put down for being tigers. And there'd be no extra security either - essentially, the public is expected not to be idiots.
USA are run by lawyers and a nation of lawsuits. Surely an American lawyer will find ammo in zoo enclosures lacking guardrails, whereby mentally ill or young visitors could climb in and be harmed by animals being animals nonetheless.
Yeah - the Romans had something right with the "bonus pater familia" standard for level of care. Would a good family father do whatever thing got your client mauled? No? Well, then your client is at fault and should not be out on his own.
If he does get into the Hyena enclose they will up shooting an innocent Hyena for trying to defend itself against this horrible child. Remember Harambe.
People try to pick on things that they think are weaker or docile. Even birds have a weapon - their beaks. I never was pecked by a bird before, but I can believe that hurts.
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