Have you ever had a run in with a dangerous wild animal?

[AbsentmindedWoman]

I'm sipping my coffee and dreaming about going camping in the wilderness. Somewhere really remote. It would be awe inspiring, but also in reality I'd be too scared of getting lost or being eaten by some of the local wildlife so will probably never actually do it.

Has anyone been wilderness camping or similar? Did you have any narrow squeaks with snakes/ jaguars/ crocodiles?

A gost ate my gagoule at Marwell Zoo in 1976. I was actually wearing it at the time.
I got felt up by someone in a Chip, or Dale, costume at Disney does that count?
DH used to be a coalman, one day he opened a garage door to throw the coal in and came face to face with a full grown tiger. This was in a tiny seaside town in NI. He nearly shit himself.
Thankfully it was chained up.
The laws on keeping exotic animals was very lax over here for years.
The plonker who owned it used to walk it on the beach on a chain .

I had a mamba in the kitchen once. The housekeeper who was hard-core sprayed it with a can of Doom and then battered it to death with a rock.

My aunt had a lion come in through a window a long time ago!

A monkey once stole my shampoo.

I grew up in West Africa and yes I’ve seen lots of pythons, scorpions. When I was 12, I saw one viper inside the toilet. I was lucky I checked the toilet before sitting on it. It still freaks me out to this day

I got chased by an emu in the Australian outback 🤣🤣 thankfully it was nervous of the huge dog I had with me

The above stories are obviously from when I lived in Africa. Bizarrely back in the UK a kid from my school was killed by a lion in the Midlands when it escaped from the circus. www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/day-10-year-old-boy-was-mauled-death-escaped-lion-lincolnshire-market-town-46459

I went scuba diving and met a blue ring octopus 🐙 😱.

Swans. They are so aggressive.

I was walking my staffy near my home which is directly beside a canal. A swan came flying through the air like it was about to water ski. It was making a god awful noise and was coming straight for my dog who shot off yelping pulling the lead out of my hand. Dog legged it all the way back to my back door.

Went out to feed the duck at the back of my house. We was feeling the mallards - no where near the friggin swans. And billy big balls came over again hissing and raising its wings. They are MASSIVE. We scarpered.

Yes tent got raided by a donkey gang in the new forest.

[quote randomkey123]@Icancelledthecheque I had exactly the same experience driving along a quiet lane and coming across cattle being moved from one field to another....... only a cow did jump on my car and wrote it off. They only just avoided coming through the windscreen. I've never been so scared in my entire life. We still live in the same area and I've never driven down that lane again as it's right by a farm.[/quote]
Bloody hell, we got off pretty lightly then all I could think was how heavy they are and we’d be buggered if one came straight for us!

Yes, our lane is bang in the middle of FarmVille too and it’s common for the cattle to be herded between fields. They’ve only once escaped and run wild though that I know of

I still have to drive on the lane 2-4 times a day though, there’s no other way round!

@CovidCorvid

I had a mamba in the kitchen once. The housekeeper who was hard-core sprayed it with a can of Doom and then battered it to death with a rock.

My aunt had a lion come in through a window a long time ago!

Bloody hell!

Water snake, Asia, we scared the bejesus out of each other and decided to go our separate ways. Only found out later how deadly it was, and how close I'd been to getting bitten with no hope of getting any kind of anti-venom in time. Bumped into it by the hull of some boats. Apparently only daft tourists like me would have been snorkelling around moored boats like that... I can still hear the sound of it skittering across the top of the water.
Bear, USA, I got REALLY lucky.

I had a shower with a red back spider at a campsite near Uluru.

I got chased around a golf course by a rabid raccoon in America. The menfolk proceeded to charge after it on a golf buggy with a net.

Years ago DH and I were visiting a small national park in Zambia. It was getting late so we walked back towards the exit, only to find that a group of wild elephants were passing through and had paused in the direction we needed to go. To follow the path we would have had to walk right through the middle of the group, passing within a couple of metres of half a dozen large elephants. We decided this was not wise, so we sat down to wait for them to move on. There was no other way out of the park. We waited for hours! Finally they ambled off, so we were able to leave. By then the park had shut for the night and we had to climb over the locked gate to get out!

Yeah backpacking in Eastern Europe 20 years ago... accidentally stumbled across wolves in the mountainous region in Transylvania.

I think I was more scared than they were interested.

Funnily enough the next hostel I stayed at I met a guy also travelling solo who was going in the opposite direction and about to head into the carpathinian mountains, and was OBSESSED that he might get eaten by a bear.

Had to tell him it was more likely the wolves would get him

Friend works for a charity and had a wild wolf came through her window in Belarus in the middle of the night ( there was no glass in the windows). She still has nightmares about it, though no-one was hurt badly. Wolves were starving, people were starving. Sounded like the people and wolves in the village she was in spent a lot of time trying to catch and eat each other...

Don't have to go anywhere for it.

Despite living in a very urban area, we have had a few encounters.

There's a small wooded bank opposite our front door across the road. It's got at least one big badger in it and she's a mean one. She will chase you if you're out after dark, especially when she has a baby in tow.

Then there are a bunch of foxes around who are not afraid and follow you.

There's also a big fat grey squirrel up the road who sits on the fence refusing to move and gives you a menacing look like he wants to kill you a boil your bones.

Got chased by a Canada goose on a river boat trip once, vicious beggars they are.

DH gets stalked at work by a female Mallard duck but I'm pretty sure she has a lurve fixation with him rather than malicious intent.

I work in a special school and one of our buses hit a stag as it jumped across the road. It mangled the front of the bus and the vibrations put the windscreen in.
The driver said it was like hitting a brick wall. The stag was fine

Do humans count? Had a British Para point his rifle at me when I was a teenager ( walking home from school in my uniform in case you're wondering) and call me a 'fucking paddy'. I genuinely thought he was going to pull the trigger.

About 20 years ago I went camping with some friends in the mountains in the south of Azerbaijan, near the border with Iran. The area was heavily wooded. As we sat around the campfire we could hear wolves howling in the distance, across the valley or so we thought.

We went to sleep, but in the night, pitch black, I had to go for a leak. I was leaning up against a tree when I noticed just a few metres away a pair of eyes, shining bright red...

Yes. Some geese hissed at me 1986 when I went to vote. Barstards. Still am a tad wary .

Yes:

1. Walking around on an island on the Zambezi, birdwatching - on the way back to the boat, a tracker pointed out a mature female crocodile under a bush, after laying her eggs. We had all walked past it twice - one swish of its tail would have broken one of our legs!
2. Walking quickly through elephant grass in Zambia, because the sun was going down and nobody wanted to be walking around the bush in the dark - we walked right into a clan of hyenas. Luckily, they were so startled, they scattered!
3. Walking along the bank, about 6 feet from the River Chobe, we heard a massive splash and we remembered a crocodile can outrun us on sand - we both jumped about 6 feet away from the bank. Then we saw a lizard’s head, not a crocodile - it was a big water monitor!

@elp30

I grew up in the southwestern US where a mountain range is in the middle of my city. As a child, I lived near the mountain. When we would have drought, wildcats and coyotes would come down looking for water. That doesn't include the other desert "friends" like rattlesnakes and tarantulas and strange creatures like vinegaroons. Ugh.

I'm now in a suburb of Houston and my son was walking with his girlfriend and saw a tiger hanging out on someone's lawn. It's been captured now, btw.

Just googled vinegaroons.

I'll be honest, I could have lived happily without knowing they exist.

Canada Geese on the canal. They attack me when I'm riding my bike. Only when they have goslings though. The rest of the time they are fine.