There was a recent report of a rabid fox attacking a child in a schoolyard this morning. It happened in a neighboring state. We have a fox in our neighborhood but it must be making sure it doesn’t piss off anybody…a couple of my neighbors have seen it while walking their dogs in the very early morning. The fox scurried away each time.
We’ve got coyotes too, and they’re a ghostly lot. Last time I saw one was back in the spring. It was standing in the middle of the intersection near my house and it dashed into a backyard when I pulled up to the intersection. It’s the coyote thing to do!
Please accept my apology for this hijack, but I have to insert a reference to an old Playboy story from the 60’s when the James Bond craze was just getting underway. I forget the author and haven’t even tried to Google for his name, but one of their regulars of the period had the character Israel Bond in a situation similar to the one in Dr. No where Bond is asleep and feels something moving on his bedcovers. In the movie it was a tarantula (or at least a big-ass spider) that Bond (at the very last second) swatted to the floor and pulverized with a shoe.
In the story in Playboy it turned out to be a polar bear! I laughed for hours at the audacity of that writer.
Jellyfish. I was bumped by them a couple times while swimming just yesterday. Either I got lucky & didn’t get stung or I’m not sensitive to that specie’s venom.
We have rabid raccoons when their population climbs, but while they tend to be scary they are also uncoordinated and easy to kill with a shovel. Compare that with the rabid fox in our yard last year. When I approached it with my shovel it began to calmly stalk me, maintaining eye contact all the while. I ran back to the house and got my shotgun.
Reminds me…I haven’t seen a raccoon in a very long time. Ditto skunks, although I do get a whiff of them every once in a great while. Must be because of the coyotes?
We have a local mountain lion, as well as coyote, fox, raccoon, bobcat, possum, skunk, and others. There are lots of deer. The chances of any of these attacking me without me attacking it first are a lot like zero. They all run like hell when they see humans (except coyotes, they trot nonchalantly away). Feral pigs can be dangerous here, mostly mommas who think you are threatening their piggy children.
By far the most likely are yellow jacket wasps. Those scare me. The rest, not at all. Well, I feel some natural caution around skunks.
I also live in Cape Town. Personally I would rate chacma baboons as the most likely. I work at the University of Cape Town, which is kind of perched on the side of the mountain, and baboons do occasionally come onto campus. Next in likelihood one of those snakes, and after that the sharks (I don’t swim a lot).
By far the likeliest is some form of insect. Hornets or fire ants especially.
Scariest? Alligators. Once protected now the damn things are nuisances. I was walking down a suburban development path once and came across one that was at least 8 feet sunning himself on the path next to a drainage ditch.
I also took a picture once of a metal post with two signs:
Top: Children at Play
Below: Alligator Warning
God help us all. They’re speed bumps with armor and teeth.
Central Texas
Fire ants
Yellow Jacket/Red Wasps
Africanised Bees
I saw Bobcat tracks down in the park beside the Colorado River
Skeeters carrying everything from West Nile to Sleeping Sickness
Humans
We have lots of ching-chings, aka West Indian Grackles, aka rats with wings. And they fly inside the house and try to make away with the cats’ food. Damn cats let them do it.
Or I could go a few feet out the back door and hammerhead sharks would be the predator of choice.
Suburban Detroit. Probably a rabid skunk (I’ve only seen a skunk around here 2 or 3 times, but every time the skunk was pretty obviously rabid). But I’ll concurr that Canadian geese can be nasty sumbitches.
I was out doing my 6 mile-walk last Saturday when a trio of ballsier-than-expected raccoons emerged from the woods in front of me and started coming toward me. They scattered when I struck the pavement with my walking stick, but it took three hard raps. Their intent was clearly murderous, but everybody knows that raccoons are evil so I shouldn’t be surprised.
Just a few weeks ago I had four strong men drag a huge snake (easily 3-4 meters long) out of a tree in front of my house. Next possibility would be a centipede. And not your pansy-ass house centipede, but one of those space alien type centipedes as long as your forearm with the huge pincers. After that, possibly a monitor lizard.
My first answer was raccoon, I had forgotten about the eight stitches I got in my thumb from a rat in my woodpile several years ago. I was my fault for hand feeding him but he did indeed attack me.
