Seventh Issue: Animals Attack

This issue is about animals! It’s not quite historical, but whatever. First up is Fred the baboon. Fred was from Cape Town, South Africa and he was a GANG LEADER!! He and his gang of baboons raided cars, stole food, and assaulted tourists!
Fred was pursued for three years before he was captured. In one attack in 2010 he injured three people who needed medical attention. When people started to mobilise against Fred, he and his gang began attacking those people too. He could open closed car doors and take food. There were discussions about him but he was so aggressive that he was euthanized. Several organizations tried to intervene but to no avail. After he died, his body was dissected and there were several shotgun pellets in his body. RIP Fred.

Another interesting animal is Gustave the man-eating crocodile who lives in Burundi.  He has killed perhaps as many as three hundred people in Lake Tanganyika. He is almost a myth in the area, larger than life. He was named by Patrice Faye, who is a herpetologist who has been studying him for almost two decades. Gustave has never been captured but they say he could be 60 years old, 25 feet long, and still growing. He is more than 2000 pounds. He has three bullet scars on his body, and he is said that he hunts but leaves his victims corpses uneaten. Since crocodiles can go for a few months without eating, he might be hunting just for sport.  In 2004 for a PBS documentary called Capturing the Killer Croc, Patrice and others tried to capture him but they only had two months from the government. They made a cage and baited the trap in the water with a live goat. The next day the goat was gone. The camera was destroyed. Gustave had outsmarted the scientists. Gustave was last seen in 2015. He is still lurking in the water.

I haven’t got any more animals I want to talk about here but I did remember my favorite set of Wikipedia pages – once I stumbled upon the page for the Jimmy Carter rabbit incident, and I was so delighted. Then I scrolled down and found related pages that were also delightful. But first. The rabbit.

So the year was 1979. Jimmy Carter went fishing by himself in Georgia. Then, a rabbit being chased by hounds “jumped in the water and swam towards my boat. When he got almost there, I splashed some water on him with a paddle”. However, none of the people he told this story believed it because they thought rabbits could not swim and would never attack a person. This story got into the news and a story in the Washington Post was on the front page: BUNNY GOES BUGS: RABBIT ATTACKS PRESIDENT. The picture was not leaked until the Reagan administration (sabotage???). But here it is, below:
  The photographer tells the story as such:

“Upon closer inspection, the animal turned out to be a rabbit. Not one of your cutesy, Easter Bunny-type rabbits, but one of those big splay-footed things that we called swamp rabbits when I was growing up.
The animal was clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk. The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind. What was obvious, however, was that this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat.”

The story was used by opponents who wanted Carter to seem weak and hapless. I’m sad about this because it’s a great story and I like Jimmy Carter.

If you go to the Wikipedia page on this event, the related pages are as follows:

• George H. W. Bush vomiting incident
• Bill Clinton haircut controversy
• Dick Cheney hunting incident
• Rabbit of Caerbannog

Every single one of these links is a fascinating journey. I highly recommend them. Sorry about how short this is this time – next week will be longer I promise because I’m going to be talking about Outsider Musicians!