Dangerous Animals

  

A news item recently aired on television showing a man carrying a young child into a zoo enclosure where an elephant ran freely. The elephant took offense at the intrusion and started charging at them. Lucky for the man, he quickly retreated to get himself and the child back to safety. I can’t think of many ways of dying that would be worse than getting trampled by drum-sized hoofs unless it’s being gored by a bull.

     It just so happens I’ve got some bull stories. One of them just appeared in the form of a prose-poem in the weekly High Plains Reader. I’d like to post it here in its entirety, but I must respect copyright laws. To paraphrase it, it’s about an eleven year old girl who is afraid of the bull in their barnyard. Her father tells her if you don’t show him who’s boss, “that bull’s going to kill you someday.” 

     He hands her a steel pipe and tells her to confront the bull, but not to worry because he’ll be standing by with rifle in hand. Ferdinand, I’ll call him that, sees her and begins the expected pawing and throwing-dirt-over-his-back routine. The girl stands there scared, but with father standing by, she charges the bull with the pipe raised high to meet the advancing bull and hits him as hard as she can between his eyes. At the end of the poem, we learn she connected solidly because ole Ferdinand “stumbles out of the barnyard on legs it can’t make work.” Her proud father tells her she is the boss now.

     Farm kids experience all manners of danger, me included. Too young to help with the milking,  I played around the barnyard when the cows were in the barn. Like the girl above, there is a bull in my story, too. Luckily I spotted him a short distance away with his eyes on me, pawing dirt and then charging towards me. Now Dad was in the process of building a lean-to on the east side of the barn which he had not yet finished siding. The rough wall boards had knotholes and spaces here and there which let my hands and toes get a grip. I climbed and reached the safety of the roof and started hollering. Dad came with his pitchfork and in turn charged the bull. Like the Ferdinand above, this one respected the steel in sharp fork tines and turned to retreat to the pasture. Maybe Dad even drew blood, but the bull was sold shortly after.

     A quick search of Google using the search term “gored by a bull” turned up a multiple of recent farmer deaths from just that. We always believed dairy breed bulls made the biggest threat towards humans. The dairy state of Wisconsin has their share of stories.

     One lady seemed to remember accurately an incident from 50 years before. Her younger brother had fallen into a bull pen where he suffered repeated battering against the gate. She grabbed a pitchfork, jumped into the pen, and started jabbing him in the head. She must have stuck the tines deep enough into his head to cause pain and distract the bull long enough to get her brother out of there.

    We were always told not to wear red clothes around a bull because it will tempt them to charge. But that was false advice. They are color blind and cannot see red. Remember the lady cattle expert Temple Grandin? She says they lack the red retina receptor and can only see yellow, green, blue, and violet colors.

     Even though bullfighters use a red cape, it’s not the color, it’s the movement of the cape that causes them to charge. The towards the end of the fight, the matador uses it to hide his sword which he uses to pierce the bull as it charges past. The red color masks the bloodstains.

     Maybe red shouldn’t be worn around humans because it is said to trigger opposing emotions and is often associated with passion and love as well as anger and danger. It can increase a person’s heart rate and make them excited. 

     The Conde Nast organization prints a lot of travel materials. As a courtesy to their readers, I’d guess, they’ve listed the ten most dangerous animals in the world. In the top three, starting with number 3 is the tsetse fly from the sub-Saharan region. It’s bite can cause sleeping sickness. Number 2 is the mosquito found everywhere except Antarctica. A whole host of illnesses can be caused by their bite. Number 1, humans top the list. We’ve been killing each other for thousands of years.

     Wars, personal assaults, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks all count toward our inhumanity towards each other. The threat of mass annihilation always exists: think atomic weapons. It’s like Conde Nast says, “we are easily number one on the list of the most dangerous animals in the world.