Archive for the 'Animals' Category

I’ve usually got a firearm nearby, but how close is close enough?

A California woman currently battling cancer has described the terror she felt after being attacked by a bear she found roaming around her kitchen early one morning.

According to Fox 11, Laurel-Rose Von Hoffman-Curzi, 66, from Orinda, suffered a deep laceration to her face which required stitches as well as other puncture wounds, cuts and bruises after being mauled by a bear at her holiday home in North Lake Tahoe last weekend.

Von Hoffmann-Curzi said she had traveled to the property to isolate while she continues to fight stage 4 lymphoma. She was alerted to the presence of someone inside the property after being woken up by loud noises coming from the kitchen at approximately 6 a.m. on Saturday morning.

Upon investigating the noise, she came face to face with a large bear which was skulking around the kitchen refrigerator. What happened next is something of a blur.

“He must have come straight at me,” Von Hoffmann-Curzi told the news outlet. “I have only a vision of the paw. It was dark and then I’m getting torn up.”

She recalled that she was “bleeding and scared and screaming” during the ordeal but still found a way to fight back against the bear, throwing a quilt at the animal and screaming at it.

Though this initially failed to deter the animal, the bear eventually left her house after it saw her husband and son.

Von Hoffman-Curzi was treated in hospital for her injuries and believes she is lucky to be alive following the attack. “I should be dead the way the bear swiped at my face,” she said.

[ … ]

“Anything that has a strong odor to it is really the number one thing that attracts bears to people’s properties,” he told Fox 11.

That explanation certainly tallies with another recent bear-based home invasion, which was reported in California earlier this week. John Holden shared shocking video footage of a small bear eating food off his kitchen counter.

Holden came home to discover his house in disarray with the bear caught polishing off the remains of a bucket of KFC he had left on the work surface. He was in no doubt as to the cause of the break-in, surmising that the smell of the fried chicken was evidently too tempting for the bear to resist.

According to Bearwise, bears are attracted to “anything that smells” and |it doesn’t even need to smell good.”

“Garbage, compost piles, dirty diapers, pizza boxes, empty beverage cans…to a hungry black bear, it all smells like something good to eat,” they warn.

I don’t think I would ever respond to noises in my home without a firearm, but based on the second report, entering and leaving the premises also creates a justification to carry.

Chicken hawks are tough on both hens and roosters.  Sometimes a rooster can fight one off, sometimes not.

The goat made the difference.  I don’t think this goat liked the invasion of his space very much.

The hawk is fortunate to have gotten out with his life.

Remember boys and girls, Coyotes are predators.

Two toddlers were taken to the hospital after being attacked by a coyote in separate incidents in the Massachusetts town of Arlington, officials said Monday.

In the first incident, around 5:40 p.m. Sunday, the animal approached a 2-year-old girl, bit her on the back and dragged her across the yard, according to police. About 10 minutes later, police received a report of a coyote scratching another 2-year-old girl at a different yard, authorities said.

Both children sustained non-life-threatening injuries and were taken to a hospital for evaluation. Officials believe the same coyote was involved in both attacks, but they were still searching for the animal Monday.

The two incidents come just three weeks after another child had a violent encounter with a coyote in the same town. The 5-year-old victim in that attack was playing in a sandbox when a coyote approached him and bit him in the leg, police said.

They won’t just take your pets, they’ll take your children if you’re not aware of the threat.  And they’ve learned to hunt in packs, and are no longer afraid of humans.

Maggie, where she was used by boys who tied her up and used her for target practice.

Here is the story.

Nearly three years ago when British dog behaviorist Kasey Carlin arrived at Heathrow Airport to meet a rescue dog flown in from Lebanon, she thought the airport staff brought her the wrong dog. She knew the mixed-breed dog had been horribly abused and expected to see signs of trauma.

“There’s this little blond dog kicking her feet up high,” Carlin, 27, told TODAY. “The first thing she does when she meets anybody is she runs into them and rubs her body on them like a cat does. My brain couldn’t even process it. She’s just so friendly.”

It’s a remarkable personality trait considering all Maggie endured before her rescue.

“They used a BB gun and used her as target practice. They had tied her up and shot her. She has about 200 pellets from her nose to her chest and some in her shoulders, but they’re all concentrated in her face,” Carlin said. “Then they pulled her eyes out. She had a broken jaw. They started cutting off her ears before somebody intervened. And she was heavily pregnant at the time.” (The puppies Maggie was carrying did not survive.)

She’s now a therapy dog.

I think I’ve told the story of when my son was in Fallujah, he happened upon an outcast dog, took the dog in, medicated the dog, washed him up, and slept with him and took him on patrols.

Be careful around Muslims with your dogs.  They see them as trash to be abused.

In the planned departure of American troops from Kabul, not only did they leave Americans behind, they left dogs as well.  I say planned because this was all carefully orchestrated to turn over weapons to the Taliban and AQ and demoralize American troops.  It covers their tracks, you see, from weapons trafficking, opium trade and other nefarious activities.

Trained dogs used by #US #Forces have also been left at #Kabul airport pic.twitter.com/iSVtbFDqHB

— Sumaira Khan (@sumrkhan1) August 31, 2021

Maybe not.  WiscoDave leaves this comment to the initial report.

It sounded far-fetched from the very beginning.

An Alaskan miner, cornered in the brutal wilderness to stand-off against a hungry brown bear for four days before being rescued by a Coast Guard’s helicopter that happened to be passing by, without a scratch on him.

But that’s what Richard Jessee, a gold hunter who was rescued last week in Nome, Alaska, said happened to him.

The unlikely story gathered attention from the national press and Jessee told proudly about hiding from the animal after it crushed his ATV and tossed his phone in a river.

Now, however, locals are questioning his version of events after going to the cabin where he was rescued but finding no evidence of the days-long battle he described.

Other local miners who were interviewed by The Nome Nugget went to the cabin where Jessee was rescued but found no bear tracks.

They did however find the ATV and attached trailer that Jessee said the bear pushed into the water.

On top of it was a packet of bacon in a cooler that was untouched.

‘There’s just no way it was a bear!’ one anonymous source said.

They think he simply crashed the ATV into the river and waterlogged it, but was too embarrassed to admit it, so made up the story after being rescued.

‘We went out there to the cabin, but we couldn’t find a bear track within 500 feet of the place, but it should have been all torn up, according to his story.

‘There’s no hair, no tracks, no scat, nothing.

‘He made a fool of us. We found out that his story didn’t match what we found.’

The lack of prints were especially odd given that the region had gone through heavy rainfall when the incident supposedly took place, which would leave the ground muddy and perfect for leaving prints.

The owner of the cabin added that he has never had issues with bears near his property.

The group also found Jessee’s ATV without a single claw mark despite Jessee’s claim that the bear attacked the vehicle and pushed it into a waterhole.

I don’t see what’s so embarrassing about telling people you crashed your ATV.  At least it’s honest – if that’s what happened.

Dean Weingarten.

On the evening of 22 September 2005, a hunting guide and his hunter, who was from Ohio, were attacked without provocation, by a grizzly bear in the Shoshone National Forest in the northwest corner of Wyoming. The details of the attack were found in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) response to AmmoLand. This correspondent has not found any other published account of this attack.

[ … ]

The guide attempted to draw his .44 magnum revolver, but the pistol hung up on the trigger guard. The bear was very close, so the guide dodged behind an eight-inch birch tree, to avoid the bear. The guide estimated he spent 40 seconds dodging the bear around the tree, until the bear grabbed him by the right side, and threw him to the ground.

With the guide on the ground, the bear worried him for a short period, then left him and ran at the hunter, who was armed with a crossbow. At ten yards, the hunter shot the bear in the chest with his bow. At the impact of the bolt, the bear stood up, and started back toward the guide, then lay down.

The hunter shouted to the guide, “She’s dead, I’m all right!” The guide got up and asked where the bear went. The hunter said “She is right next to you, about 6-8 feet away.” The guide determined the bear was still breathing, so he shot her in the back of he head with the .44 magnum.

This is impressive skills at composure under pressure.  Still, I’d rather have successfully deployed the .44 magnum handgun.

BBC.

The man told them he had been attacked by a bear and hadn’t slept for days after it kept coming back to his camp.

He was found with chest bruising and an injured leg he had taped up.

The helicopter crew had been on their way to fly a team of scientists on a wildlife research mission when they were diverted off-course by weather and spotted the distress message.

According to the New York Times, the man had almost run out of ammunition for his gun and the door of the shack where he was staying had been ripped off.

“At some point, a bear had dragged him down to the river,” Lieutenant Commander Jared Carbajal told the newspaper. “He had a pistol. He said that the bear kept coming back every night and he hadn’t slept in a few days.”

The pilots found the man stumbling out the shack waving a white flag.

The man has not been named but officials said he is in his late 50s or early 60s and had been reported overdue home from the trip by friends.

The US Coast Guard flew him to hospital in order to get medical attention, but say his injuries are not life-threatening.