The Book of Deadly Animals by Gordon Grice

Author:Gordon Grice [Grice, Gordon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781101572238
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

The cassowary is the most aggressive ratite bird in the wild.

Cassowaries normally hide when they sense humans. In New Guinea, the native people hunt them for food, and a cornered cassowary defends itself with leaping kicks. Occasionally a person is disemboweled. Similar attacks occur when the males defend their territories in the mating season. In Australia and New Zealand, wild cassowaries seem to attack people about half a dozen times in a decade, often because nature enthusiasts offer to feed them. A captive cassowary tore into a keeper’s leg at the San Francisco Zoo in 2001.

Gallinaceous birds — chickens and their kin — can be far more aggressive than the ratites, though their size limits their effect. An ordinary barnyard rooster will attack people by flogging with its wings and scratching with its talons and spurs. Fighting cocks — roosters bred for combat — are especially formidable. An acquaintance of mine whose family was involved in cockfighting told me she saw a cock easily dispatch a domestic cat. Often, a rooster flies in the face of a child, lacerating the skin and endangering the eyes. At the farm of some friends, a red rooster struck a five-year-old girl, drawing blood from her cheek. The victim was only slightly taller than her attacker. Her father took umbrage, then took the rooster’s head. Adults get attacked, too, but greater height helps protect their faces.

A news report from 2001 describes a large wild turkey harassing a postal carrier, ‘He’s really scary,’ the carrier said. ‘He’s got feet bigger than my hands.’ Wild turkeys may weigh 25 pounds and have wingspans of six feet. They are armed with spurs more than an inch long. Despite the silly image conjured by their overweight domestic brethren, they can injure people. Peacocks, too, are fairly aggressive and have scratched many people.

Swans and geese are far more aggressive than the gallinaceous birds, both in defending territory and in demanding food. Almost every child who grew up on a farm with geese has a tale of terror to relate. One kinsman of mine was, at age five, battered about the head by a goose so badly that his grandfather had to run to the rescue. He stopped the bird by decapitating it with a swing of the pitchfork he happened to be holding.

A zoo Tracy and I used to visit when we lived in Kansas provided a good sample of swan aggression. It was a modest zoo, with emus galloping through a pasture and a crippled eagle on an iron perch inside a huge sagging cage. A cement wall surrounded a flat and grassless yard that, a sign explained, was home to a badger; but badgers are nocturnal, and the zoo was open only in the day, so I never saw him. There were bighorn sheep, a reclusive bobcat, and a half-dozen shaggy bison whose hair peeled off in great sheets in the summer.

Tracy and I came mostly for the pond, a little landscaped affair with a wooden bridge over it.

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