I’ve mentioned this incident elsewhere, but the award-winner to date is the time I stopped the car to aid a large turtle in the road, carrying it to safety. It turned out to be a snapping turtle.
Neither of us was injured, but the turtle was pissed.
I also once rescued a green tree frog from the jaws of a snake. The frog was calling piteously and I had no choice. It was a non-venomous snake, but still.
I have two stories that are both a bit dangerous and stupid, both involving dogs.
The first was relatively recent, about 2 years ago. A client pulled into the parking lot, opened their door, and their dog jumped out and started running.
I went out to help to get the dog back, but by the time I was out there, the dog was in the middle of the road. Not a really really busy road, but busy enough. And a school bus was coming. The dog just stayed frozen in the middle of the lane.
I don’t think that the driver saw the dog, so, I stepped out into the road in front of the bus. Now, this wasn’t like right in front of it, and I judged that it had plenty of time to stop, hopefully, assuming that it noticed me. And I probably would have stepped out of the way if it didn’t look like it was going to slow.
But I still had some heart pounding moments as I watched this bus bear down on me and come to a stop, a moderately comfortable distance away. Managed to scoop up the dog and bring it inside.
The second was almost 20 years ago. My parents had rented a condo at the beach. I was out on the fishing pier when I heard some commotion from the end. I went down to see what was going on, and apparently someone’s dog had jumped off. Looked like a Labrador. Now, dogs can swim, but it was relatively rough water, and it kept getting swept into the piles. Looked like it was struggling and in trouble.
I was already wearing swim attire, so I pulled off my shirt and kicked off my shoes, and dove in. It was about 25 feet, and I’ve dove off from higher places before, not that big a deal, but never into rough water, so that was a bit different. And never into kinda shallow water with mud. I was expecting to go to the bottom and kick off, but instead, my feet just went into the mud and got a bit stuck. I pulled them out, and then swam to the surface, much lower on air than I was expecting to be, and was immediate thrown into one of the pillars by the waves. That hurt, and this is the point where I’m starting to get a bit worried, that maybe I had just done something stupid.
I had worked as a lifeguard for a couple summers at my local pool, and had my lifeguard and lifesaving merit badges from Boy Scouts, but this wasn’t really a situation that I had been trained for.
I tried to get close to the dog, but it started thrashing and trying to pull me under, so I backed up again and assessed what was going on. I was a strong enough swimmer to keep from being battered against the pillar again. Apparently the dog’s leash was caught on one of the pillars, this was keeping it from being able to get away. I managed to get over to it, disentangle the leash where it was wedged on a cross support, and now the dog was able to swim away from the pier. It immediately seemed to calm down now that it was no longer trapped.
It was going a bit aimlessly, so I picked up the leash and started towards shore, and the dog happily followed behind. I was met about halfway back by a lifeguard, which was nice, as I was getting a bit worn out at this point. He let me use his float, but he refused to take the leash, so I held onto that.
The dog’s owners met me at the beach, and thanked me profusely, while the lifeguard chewed me out. I did ask him if he would have gone in after the dog, and he said. “No!”. He threatened to fine me for diving off the pier, but nothing ever came of that.
They gave me their number and told me to call them and they would give me a reward, but once the adrenalin stopped, I actually did start feeling a bit foolish about the whole thing, so I never did call them.
I got too close to a skunk to grab a dog that had decided the skunk was very interesting. But I didn’t get sprayed. Pretty tame wrt to pretty much all of the above.