As always true wisdom is found in country songs:
If the Phone Don't Ring, You'll Know It's Me
-Rusty Ford -- My Truck, My Dog, and You
This was more akin to getting stepped on by a giraffe that didn’t see you there. Total accident.
Ostrich: They're not bright - the bird's eyeball is bigger than its brain. Last ostriches that I saw were a whole herd that came up to the fence with open mouths in anticipation of snacks, which was kinda cute. I guess a large male could get aggressive and the kick would be very nasty?
Hipppo: Very dangerous. They may be herbivorous but they're aggressive and territorial. They will flatten you if they're in a bad mood, and they're almost always in a bad mood. A hippo is 2 tons of bastard; and don't bother running, they're faster than you, on land or in water. Best to avoid them entirely.
I'm not joking, google "most dangerous large animal in Africa", read about hippos and how they kill more humans than any other African animal larger than a mosquito.
In my very limited experience (4 or 5 day safari in Kruger), Giraffes are pretty shy, but you really want to avoid startling them or otherwise putting them in a situation where they feel a need to defend themselves or their young.
Well, you don't know what you're missing, and it might be part of your problem. Just say'n.
Funnily enough, I am a Leo.
For the record, it’s estimated that American deer hunters have a success rate between 6-13%, depending on the method and state. So lions are apparently more consistently successful hunters than humans with guns.
Elephants are mostly safe, except the male ones occasionally snap and hunt humans. So…
Focusing in on Stingrays, the number of confirmed deaths by stingrays is maybe as high as 30 ever. Yes, Steve Irwin was one of them, but that doesn’t magically move the statistics, it just makes it more salient.
For comparison, coconuts kill 150 or so people per year. In a real, measurable way, taking a nap under a coconut tree is more dangerous than swimming with a stingray.
Ha! "I was completely inside" What else needs to happen for you to think there might be an element of being unsafe? The man was swallowed by a whale, I don't care if whales are aggressive or not, if anything can swallow me whole I consider that a bit unsafe.
> This was more akin to getting stepped on by a giraffe that didn’t see you there.
So you also consider hanging out near giraffes to be completely safe knowing they might accidentally step on you?
That's a very interesting definition of safety.
I think what you want to say is that animals like whales are friendly and we shouldn't harm them. Point taken.
If a thing happens once, you decide it's categorically unsafe? Not a freak accident?
Must be rough for you to actually do anything, given the how many possibilities there are to accidentally die doing basically anything.
Swim in an ocean, walk outside, or keep breathing: there's a specific set of risks associated with every type of activity.
Ocean risks include drowning, hypothermia, strong currents, ocean-wave injuries, jellyfish, coral scrapes, Portuguese man o' wars, sea urchins, stingrays, sharks, whales, red/green/brown tides, and lightning.
I also agree that there is a level of personal responsibility that can’t be abstracted away to just the perpetrators
And finally, sometimes people just get eaten
How would you phrase it? "Eaten by a whale?" Is that less victim blame-y?
> Shouldn't have been in the ocean.
You can swim in the ocean just don't go near where the whales are, it might just help with not becoming a victim of whales' constant eating habit and as a result alleviate the tendency to make greatly exaggerated sarcastic remarks.
He didn’t even know the whale was around.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgHxFNFWlZc&ab_channel=mathy...
[0] https://candleberryinn.com/whale-watching-brewster-ma/
[1] https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-seaworld-san-diego...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah#Scientific_speculation
>In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, naturalists, interpreting the Jonah story as a historical account, became obsessed with trying to identify the exact species of the fish that swallowed Jonah. In the mid-nineteenth century, Edward Bouverie Pusey, professor of Hebrew at Oxford University, claimed that the Book of Jonah must have been authored by Jonah himself and argued that the fish story must be historically true, or else it would not have been included in the Bible. Pusey attempted to scientifically catalogue the fish, hoping to "shame those who speak of the miracle of Jonah's preservation in the fish as a thing less credible than any of God's other miraculous doings".