From the CNN article that I linked, bison injure more people:
“This is the first reported incident in 2022 of a visitor threatening a bison (getting too close to the animal) and the bison responding to the threat by goring the individual,” officials said in the news release. “Bison have injured more people in Yellowstone than any other animal. They are unpredictable and can run three times faster than humans.”
But, surprisingly, deaths from bison are relatively rare. This article states that only two people have been killed by bison from 1872 to 2013, while seven have been killed by wolves, and eight by bears.
That’s my thinking. I mean, they eat grass, right?
As was related to me fourth- or fifth-hand, the Japanese woman in my earlier post thought that the animals in Yellowstone were tame. Like a 3,500 square mile petting zoo.
Ouch! Hopefully it stopped hurting after two or three.
Some years ago when we were leaving Grand Canyon, due to road construction in the park we wound up exiting on a dirt road I didn’t even know existed that meandered around a bit then ended at AZ-64 just north of the airport in Tusayan. About a half mile from the airport, still in the forest, there was an elk cow standing right by the road so we stopped to stare at her (not getting out of the car). After a couple minutes she was getting restive. We figured we were between her and her calf so we left before it escalated.
I went through Yellowstone on a motorcycle, once. There were bison pretty close to the road, and I kept a wary eye on them, but thankfully none of them took an interest in me.
I hiked across Grand Canyon about 15 years ago. Finished around midnight, so it was the dead of night and I was exhausted driving out of the park. I’ve never seen so many deer in my life.
Scientist is forced to develop time machine for his owner/patron, who wants to see dinosaurs. Science guy shows him a herd of herbivores (Diplodocous as I recall), guy says “send me there”. Dino picks him up, crushes him, tastes him, spits him out as “yucky”.
There’s a farm in my general area that raises American bison. I went on a farm tour once.
The farmer loaded us all in the back of a pickup truck and drove us out into the field – with firm instructions to stay in the truck, arms included. We were all also farmers, with sense enough to know that when a farmer tells you their livestock are dangerous and how to behave around them, you listen. I did not see a single finger outside that truck bed.
– The bison checked to see whether the truck was delivering anything interesting to eat, and then ignored us entirely. I’ve never seen domestic cattle do that – they generally either come over to humans for attention, or avoid us and move away for fear of the wrong attention. The bison weren’t either afraid of us, or interested in us.
(And yes, cows aren’t harmless, either. Very few creatures are, if you behave the wrong way around them.)
Very few animals understand that the people in a vehicle are separate entities, even when they can obviously see them in an open-topped jeep. Safari vehicles generally do not have protective cages or bars because they are unnecessary. Animals that are unfamiliar with vehicles may run away; those that are familiar with them will usually just ignore them. Not food, no threat, not a competitor, no more significance than a tree. Exceptions are bigger animals like elephants and rhinos, who may respond with the same kind of aggression that they would exhibit toward another large animal too close to their personal space - but not because they see them as containing humans. If somebody is foolish enough to get out of the vehicle, there is an immediate and different response to the presence of a human.
I’m fairly sure that primates do see humans in vehicles as separate entities. Hyenas and wild dogs maybe.
So the bison are responding just as you’d expect, and I would doubt that cows are responding to seeing humans if they are inside a vehicle. The cows may be responding to an association between vehicles and food coming their way. I could be wrong about the cows though. It may be that if the farmer feeds the cows of the back of a truck that they have figured it out - wild animals don’t get fed that way of course.
How do the people reporting this know that it isn’t that animals familiar with people in touring vehicles have learned that people in those vehicles aren’t a danger, but that people not in such a vehicle might be?
– I once saw a fox asleep, in the middle of the day, on a lawn next to the road (rural area, farmhouse lawn.) I thought it might have been hit by a car or be rabid; in any case, that was unusual enough that I slowed down (or stopped, I can’t remember) and called out the open window at the fox. The fox, which must have ignored other cars on that road in order to fall asleep there in the first place, picked its head up, saw me looking straight at it, and immediately ran off at high speed. I was very definitely still inside the car; but it knew that a car proceeding down the road was no danger to it, but that a car with a human inside paying obvious attention to it might be.
I would expect that animals in safari country would learn that humans inside a vehicle weren’t a danger even if the humans were looking right at them, but might well think that humans outside the vehicle could be a different matter.
These particular bison, IIRC, were sometimes also fed from a truck.
But that is an interesting issue. Deer will let a human on a tractor get much closer than a human on foot – but I think not a human on a tractor carrying a deer rifle. I’ll have to ask my neighbors about that. If they make a distinction between a human on a tractor with a rifle and a human on a tractor without a rifle, then they probably know that’s a human on the tractor.
I’ve seen reports that humans seeing, for the first time, other humans on horses thought at first that they were seeing some sort of centaur – but I’ve never been sure that the people making those reports were right about the confusion, and weren’t mistaking astonishment that ‘hey, you can ride these things!’ for astonishment at seeing an assumed new creature.
Most African wild animals are afraid of humans or at least wary of them. If someone exits a safari vehicle to a point where they form a visually distinct separate entity, there is an instant change with the animals immediately going on high alert. They respond as though the person just materialized out of nowhere. It can also happen if someone in an open-topped vehicle stands up. It’s pretty clear that’s associated with the visual perception of a distinct entity.
Your alternative hypothesis is that they might know there are people in the vehicle, but just associate people coming on foot with greater danger. But if they understand that a person is contained within a vehicle, and that it’s easy for someone to get out of the vehicle, it would not make a lot of sense for there to be a sudden transition from safe to dangerous for the same person.
The other piece of evidence is the fact that hungry predators never show any interest in people in vehicles, even when there is absolutely no physical barrier.
But that is not hugely different from how people react to vehicles. When they are moving, we generally ignore them, except to avoid being in their path. When a car stops where we were not expecting it to, we tend to take notice. If someone gets out of a strange car in a strange place, our attention level tends to rise dramatically as we try to assess the person and the situation.
But here we’re talking about a vehicle with 10 people in it parked 30 feet away for an extended period watching the animals. With the animals just completely ignoring them, showing no interest whatsoever. But then if someone gets out of the vehicle, instantly going on high alert. The dramatic change really doesn’t make sense if the animal understands that this potentially threatening person was sitting in the vehicle and could get out at any time.
Similarly with predators, lions for example. Absolutely no interest in people in an open-topped vehicle sitting nearby watching for an extended period, when they could easily jump in the vehicle. They just completely ignore them. But again, if someone gets out - an instant change to high alert. Usually to just run off, but sometimes to look straight at the person and assess them as potential dinner. Again, if they understand that there are prey-sized creatures in the vehicle - well, they don’t need a tin opener.
It does make sense if they’re very used to vehicles parking with people watching them from inside but posing no danger, but either are not used to those people getting out of the vehicles (or standing upright in them) or have had at least one negative experience involving people doing so.
And if they instantly go on high alert the moment someone stands up or gets out – they haven’t been ignoring the vehicles-with-people-sitting-in-them. What they’ve been doing is going about their ordinary business in the presence of what they think is probably not a hazard; while keeping a part of an ear or eye on the situation. If they’d been entirely ignoring the vehicles-with-people, there wouldn’t be an instant reaction, there’d be a delay before animals who’d previously not been looking that way at all realized anybody had gotten out.
– I think humans also tend to pay a whole lot of attention to visual information, often not realizing that other creatures may be relying a lot more on their ears and noses and even changes in air movement. Lots of creatures “watch” us while their eyes are aimed elsewhere.
O lordy I know better but I read the pinhead comments. “It’s just a mistake. Can’t sue every time they get an order wrong.” This isn’t forgetting to add the onions; there’s no version of the Filetofish that comes with bacon. The casual racism and lack of empathy out there still shocks me, but it shouldn’t.
