Animals
The true origin of Sasquatch
By Lisa Kadane 21st July 2022
Stories of a hairy, forest-dwelling, bi-pedal primate have persisted for centuries in British Columbia. But perhaps more important than whether it exists, is what it symbolizes.
From a lookout above the Harrison River Valley in south-western British Columbia, dense forest stretches all the way to the snow-capped Coast Mountains on the Pacific shore. Thick with towering western red cedars, hemlock and Sitka spruce trees, the wilderness continues almost uninterrupted all the way north to Alaska.
Beyond the roads and hiking trails, the terrain soon becomes impassable, punctuated by steep mountains that plunge into glacier-carved lakes. This remote valley 130km east of Vancouver conjures an ancient land filled with mystery and possibility, and some believe it’s home to the world’s most famous cryptid – Sasquatch, Canada’s Bigfoot.
I’d arrived at the viewpoint in an all-terrain vehicle with Bhima Gauthier, who leads tours to spots in the region where sightings have been reported.
“I can’t say for sure that they are real,” he said. “I have a feeling that there has to be some truth behind it. And there’s a lot of stories, especially here we have a very rich mythology.”
There have been 37 notable Sasquatch sightings near the town of Harrison Hot Springs since 1900. Called Bigfoot in the United States, and yeti or metoh kangmi (“wild man of the snows”) in the Himalaya, Sasquatch is a tall, hairy, bi-pedal, primate-like creature of disputed existence. Regular sightings have kept the popular legend alive, but now it’s being told from an Indigenous perspective. The change is driven by public interest in the idea of a Sasquatch rooted in spirituality and symbolism, rather than sensationalism. The creature is considered sacred to West Coast First Nations, particularly the Sts’ailes (sta-hay-lis), who have lived in the Harrison River Valley for at least 10,000 years.
To sate a growing curiosity, Harrison Hot Springs opened a Sasquatch Museum inside its visitor centre in 2017, and worked with Sts’ailes member Boyd Peters, who provided input on the original Sts’ailes acquisitions, including a drum and replica wood mask of Sasquatch. Other displays explain the Sts’ailes belief in Sasquatch as a caretaker of the land and totem for their nation (a stylized image of Sasquatch is on the Sts’ailes flag). These exhibits are juxtaposed with casts of Sasquatch footprints, news clippings about sightings that date to 1884 and a logbook of reported local encounters. Since the museum opened, tourist numbers to the visitor centre have doubled to 20,000 annually, and the resort community received a CAD $1 million government grant to build an expanded museum-and-visitor-centre facility that will aim to balance the telling of Western sighting accounts with Sts’ailes stories and mythology. It’s slated to open in 2023.
Under the dim green glow of the coastal rainforest, it’s easy to see how someone could mistake a mossy stump for a humanoid life form (Credit: Tourism Harrison/Graham Osborne)
Long before TV shows such as Animal Planet’s Finding Bigfoot sensationalised the pursuit of the creature, the Sts’ailes passed down songs and stories about sasq’ets, a supernatural slollicum, or shapeshifter, that protects the land and people. In fact, Sasquatch is the anglicised version of sasq’ets (sas-kets), which means “hairy man” in Halq’emeylem, the Sts’ailes upriver dialect.
“The word comes from a mountain that’s called Sasq’ets Tel, the place where the Sasquatch gather,” said Kelsey Charlie, a Sts’ailes band councillor (an elected governance position). “Everybody paid reverence and honour to the emblem of our nation, which is the Sasquatch.”
Long before TV shows sensationalised the pursuit of the creature, the Sts’ailes passed down songs and stories about sasq’ets
This intersection of Sasquatch as symbolic totem, and Sasquatch as living primate, has taken the story beyond mere speculation in Harrison Hot Springs. The town has become a magnet for those seeking answers, like the 26 percent of Canadians that believe cryptids such as Sasquatch are “definitely” or “probably” real, according to an Angus Reid Institute public opinion poll from 2016.
“People literally come here on a pilgrimage, and more than you might think,” said Robert Reyerse, executive director of Tourism Harrison.
In addition to visiting the Sasquatch Museum, visitors can take a Sasquatch tour with Gauthier’s company, Harrison Lake Nature Adventures, or walk the Sasquatch Trail and take selfies next to Sasquatch statues. Every June, visitors can attend Sasquatch Days, which have been held since 1938. At the event, West Coast First Nations gather for canoe races, salmon barbeque and Sts’ailes Sasquatch dances.
A historical photo shows Sts’ailes community members dressed in sasq’ets costumes for the original 1938 Sasquatch Days festival (Credit: courtesy Kelsey Charlie)
“Your first thought is, these [visitors] are going to be crazy, but they’re not,” said Reyerse. “They’re like ordinary people and some of their stories are pretty compelling.”
The town also draws researchers such as Thomas Steenburg, who has written four books on the subject, including In Search of Giants: Bigfoot Sasquatch Encounters, and has appeared as a guest speaker on the subject at events such as Alberta Culture Days. He insists he remains a healthy sceptic.
“I accept the possibility that the Sasquatch may turn out to be nothing more than mythology and folklore, and that alone makes it worth looking into,” said Steenburg, who lives in the nearby city of Mission.
If Sasquatch is real, Steenburg believes it’s an unclassified primate, possibly gigantopithecus blacki, an extinct ape from southern China that could have crossed the Bering Land Bridge and remained concealed in North America’s vast boreal forest. But the fact that no one has produced credible documentation of Sasquatch bothers him. Ultimately, the burden of proof lies in DNA, he said.
“Science needs what science has always demanded: a body or piece of body,” said Steenburg, standing next to a display case of Sasquatch footprint casts inside the Sasquatch Museum.
If Sasquatch is real, researcher Thomas Steenburg believes it’s an unclassified primate, possibly gigantopithecus blacki (Credit: Lisa Kadane)
My curiosity piqued, I went hiking in nearby Sasquatch Provincial Park. Under the dim green glow of the coastal rainforest, it’s easy to see how someone could mistake a mossy stump for a humanoid life form. It’s a psychological effect called pareidolia – seeing an object where there is none, such as Jesus on a piece of toast. This phenomenon could explain the sightings, like the dark figure spotted close to a campground outhouse in 2010, or a purported Sasquatch that caused a group to flee another campground in 1994.
It’s comforting to pass these off as someone’s overactive imagination, but these woods give Bonnie Kent pause. A former volunteer with BC Search and Rescue, she helped extract lost hikers from the bush for 15 years.
Kent, now manager of the Sasquatch Museum, initially rolled her eyes about the creature. But after listening to stories from travellers who have come from as far away as New Zealand, she became open-minded about the possibility. “My first response was that people around here used to smoke too much weed and see big hairy guys!” she said with a laugh, before turning serious. “Out in the bush there are a number of times when your hair stands up; there are areas that you just feel you’re not supposed to be there.”
As Charlie explained, Sts’ailes tradition holds that the creature can change from its physical form to a rock, tree or even another animal. “My grandpa used to say, ‘The slollicum is a shapeshifter and can walk in the two realms, the spiritual and the physical. That’s why you’ll never catch him,'” he said.
But he’s not surprised people are still trying. “I think [Sasquatch] resonates because all cultures in the world had some thing, like a supernatural being, and through time and evolution and humanness, we’ve lost a lot of these things,” said Charlie. Perhaps science has made us all sceptics.
Charlie told me about how he saw two Sasquatch drinking water from Harrison Lake in 2002, a dusk sighting that made his hair stand up on end. At the time, he was bashful to tell anyone what he’d seen, fearing derision.
“The word comes from a mountain that’s called Sasq’ets Tel, the place where the Sasquatch gather,” said Kelsey Charlie, a Sts’ailes band councillor (Credit: Lisa Kadane)
“You don’t want to have people looking at you in a certain way,” Charlie explained. “Then again, I thought, ‘Xwem xwem sq’welewel,’ which in our language means, ‘you’re proud of who you are, where you come from and what you belong to.” So, he shared his story.
Ultimately, seeing Sasquatch is considered a blessing and a sign of good luck, Charlie’s grandfather used to say. “If you’re able to see him, hear him or see his footprints, there’s some type of good fortune that’s going to come your way because he’s making sure that you know that he’s there and that you still have to live by the rules,” said Charlie, referring to the agreement between humans and sasq’ets to live in harmony with nature. “They live off the land, they live on the land, they are the land.”
It’s a sentiment shared by Steenburg, and perhaps a place where Sts’ailes mythology and Western fascination come together. “Sasquatch, if it exists, is a symbol that there’s still wilderness out there,” he said. “We haven’t tamed everything.”
Parachuting Beavers
At last, the world can witness a troop of parachuting beavers landing in backcountry Idaho: after a fish and game historian discovered delicate, mislabeled film of the phenomenon and the Idaho Historical Society released it on YouTube in October, 2015.
The footage remarkably shows professional trappers packing the beavers into ventilated boxes and dropping them from airplanes for relocation, as a solution to beaver overpopulation in some areas. The idea seems absurd (as well as potentially lethal, though no beavers appear harmed in the film) but the long-lost footage — from around 1950, as Boise State Public Radio reports — comes with plenty of records to prove that the burgeoning beaver population really was a problem in mid-century Idaho.
However, TIME accounts of contemporary Idaho beaver problems show that concern about the beaver population wasn’t the only reason the government would have wanted to relocate the rodents. In fact, there were also significant economic benefits to the relocation program.
Lumpy distribution of beavers was causing a problem in the state: in overpopulated areas, they were damaging the rural land with their damming tendencies. In underpopulated areas, water needs weren’t being met. The goal was to allow the entire beaver population to flourish productively, raising its population to the estimated 200,000 that could be supported by the land. TIME reported as early as 1939 that the Interior Department had been trapping beavers and releasing them in eroded areas, so that they would build dams and promote a more even distribution of moisture:
The value of the North American beaver (Castor canadensis) lies as much in his teeth and his temperament as in his fur…By the end of last season, some 500 beavers were busily damming streams under Government supervision, by the end of this year more than 1,000 may be at work.
With hundreds of arid Idaho acres already reclaimed by silt-catching beaver dams, Department of Interior experts look forward to using more beavers in Oregon and California. Cost of trapping and transplanting a beaver: $8. Estimated value of one beaver’s work: $300.
In 1941, Idaho beavers made national news in the pages of TIME once more when five specimens crucially stabilized a water supply in Salmon, Idaho, “saving the city the cost of a dam.” Beaver trappers moved the beavers in a more conventional manner in that case, but it’s clear that—by land or by air—the beavers could help Idaho just as much as Idaho could help the beavers.
The cost of building a dam wasn’t the only money involved in the beaver-moving project. Popular Mechanics Magazine ran a 1949 feature on the parachuting Idaho beavers, which also mentions that the trappers working with the effort were able to keep some of the animals for themselves, to sell their fur coats. At a time when the beaver population was estimated at 90,000 in Idaho, beaver trappers were allowed to only skin a few for their own profit, and then took care of the rest of the beaver population in designated areas.
Here’s more on the parachuting rodents:
In past years the state commission used trucks and pack animals for transplanting the beavers but on long trips the animals often perished because they were kept away from water for too long. Now, a journey of any distance is performed by airplane. Its cheaper and more reliable.
Dropping the beavers by parachute is a new experiment and more than 3 of the animals have been dropped successfully to date. It’s a tricky operation and it takes a skilled mountain pilot to pick out the stream that has been selected for the drop and to get down to within a couple hundred feet of the ground, the altitude at which the drops are made. The wind must be gauged just right so that the parachute and its burden won’t drift into trees. Usually, the chute lands within a hundred feet or so of the stream. A male and female are planted close together on the same stream so that a new colony may be started.
The parachuting strategy has since faded out of practice.
Steve Nadeau, Fish and Game’s Idaho fur bearer manager told the AP, “We haven’t done airplane drops for 50-plus years, but it apparently worked pretty well back then to re-establish them in remote places.”
Pakistani Goat Sporting Enormous 21-Inch-Long Ears Becomes Sensation
A goat in Pakistan has become something of a sensation thanks to its enormous ears, which measure a whopping 21 inches in length. The jaw-dropping creature, dubbed Simba, was reportedly born in Karachi last month and, as word of the wondrous animal began to spread, the creature quickly became an unexpected celebrity in its home country and spawned headlines around the world. “Within 10 to 12 days of his birth, he was already appearing in all the national and international media,” marveled Simba’s owner Mohammad Hasan Narejo, “within 30 days, he became so popular that even a famous personality might take 25 to 30 years to achieve this level of fame.”
Understandably proud of the unique creature, Narejo has even attempted to get Guinness World Records to award Simba with the honor of being the ‘longest-eared goat.’ Alas, such a category does not exist, though one assumes that the animal’s owner is hoping that the record keepers will see to it to create the title. Beyond the unfulfilled championship chase, Simba has also faced a few challenges brought about by its prodigious ears, most notably difficulty with walking due to the animal’s propensity to trip over its prodigious appendages. Fortunately, Narejo has managed to solve that problem by designing a special ‘ear harness’ for the goat.
Perhaps more troubling, Narejo laments, are concerns that the creature could be cursed by rival goat breeders who are jealous of Simba’s blossoming stardom. As such, the animal’s owner has turned to prayer in order to ward off such bad karma. “We recite Koranic verses and blow on him to cast away the evil eye,” Narejo revealed, “following a long tradition we inherited from our elders, we have fastened a black thread around him that is fortified with Koranic verses.” As for what the future holds for Simba, his owner hopes that the eye-catching creature can serve as a symbol for the Pakistani goat breeding industry, which he contends is the best in the world.
Meet Mr. Happy Face, the World’s Ugliest Dog with the ‘sweetest soul’
A Chihuahua-Chinese crested mix, rescued from neglect and hoarding, takes home top prize at annual contest.
Mr. Happy Face won the World’s Ugliest Dog Competition in Petaluma, Calif., on June 24. (Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)
When Jeneda Benally registered Mr. Happy Face for the World’s Ugliest Dog contest, she didn’t think he could possibly win because he’s “too beautiful.”
But the rescued 17-year-old Chihuahua-Chinese crested mix with a protruding tongue, tilted head and white mohawk came out on top.
“I describe Mr. Happy Face as having the ears of a bat, the tufted hair like Robert Smith from The Cure, a tongue longer than Gene Simmons quite possibly, a snarl just as cool as Billy Idol, and he’s got eyes that are filled with so much love.”
The idea is to promote adoption and rescue, especially for pooches that might otherwise be overlooked. The winner gets a $1,500 US ($1,930 Cdn) prize and a trip to New York City to appear on the Today show.
“Many of the contestant dogs have been rescued from shelters and puppy mills, to find loving homes in the hands of those willing to adopt,” the organizers wrote.
Mr. Happy Face exemplifies that mission perfectly.
“He’s getting a lot of extra attention, and I think that’s pretty fabulous for him. I mean, considering that when I adopted him from the shelter just 10 months ago, he was considered to be probably the most unadoptable dog there,” Benally said.
That’s not just because of his unusual esthetic. He also has tumours and neurological issues that require lifelong medicine and medical care.
Benally, centre, holds up Mr. Happy Face. On the right is Ann Lewis of Coos Bay, Ore., with her dog Wild Thing, the second-place winner of the World’s Ugliest Dog contest. On the left is Scotch Haley of Pleasant Hill, Calif., with his dog Monkey, the third place winner. (D. Ross Cameron/The Associated Press)
As a survivor of neglect and hoarding, he’s also got some psychological wounds.
“When I adopted him, he was afraid of human touch,” Benally said. “It took three months until I was allowed to touch Mr. Happy Face’s face.”
Benally says that when she adopted Mr. Happy Face, she was told he only had an estimated six weeks to live at the most. She took him home anyway, hoping to provide some love and comfort in his final days.
Ten months later, he’s going strong.
“So it definitely shows what love and caring and nurturing can do to someone’s life,” she said.
Benally on stage with Mr. Happy Face on stage during the World’s Ugliest Dog competition. (Josh Edelson/AFP/Getty Images)
Nowadays, Benally says Mr. Happy Face is thriving and spreading joy wherever he goes. She’s a musician and plans to take the pooch on tour with her this summer, and host meet and greets with him before and after each show. She’s also hoping to set up some visitations with children’s hospitals.
“Even though I named him Mr. Happy Face because I thought his face was happy, I have seen the joy and the happiness, the smiles, that he brings to other people’s faces,” she said.
“So I kind of feel like, well, maybe I named him because it’s the effect that he has on people. And maybe I just didn’t know that yet.”
Benally supports the contest’s mission to promote adoption. As a Navajo woman, she says she wants to use Mr. Happy Face’s newfound fame to promote organizations that help “rez dogs” — stray dogs that live in First Nations or Native American reservations — including the Blackhat Humane Society, Mountain Girl Rescue and the Tuba City Humane Society.
After all, she says doing something kind is the best way to honour Mr. Happy Face — a dog who, despite his “Ugliest” title, brings beauty to the world.
“He is the sweetest soul that one could ever hope to encounter in their life,” she said.
Florida nabs largest python ever found in state
Her last meal was an entire white-tailed deer, and she was on her way to a rendezvous with a male snake when the largest python ever found in Florida met her demise.
Weighing in at 215lbs (98kg) and nearly 18ft long (5m), the female Burmese python was caught after researchers used a male “scout” to find her.
She wrestled with biologists for 20 minutes before she was “subdued”, they said Wednesday.
Pythons have become pests in Florida as invasive snakes with no major predators, out-competing native species.
The serpents have been periodically found in the state since irresponsible pet owners released or allowed pet pythons to escape years ago, with many then going on to thrive in Florida’s subtropical climate.
The record-setting Burmese female killed by researchers from the Conservancy of Southwest Florida was about the height of a giraffe if stretched out vertically, according to state biologist Ian Bartoszek.
She had been slithering around the Florida Everglades forest when biologists, using a male python named Dionysus outfitted with a radio transmitter, found her.
He stopped at a spot in the western part of the forest. “We knew he was there for a reason, and the team found him with the largest female we have seen to date,” Mr Bartoszek said. She was also discovered to have been pregnant with an astonishing 122 eggs.
The largest male ever found there was 16ft and 140lbs.
It is estimated that she was up to 20 years old when caught.
Researchers have been hunting pythons in Florida for over 10 years in an effort to protect native species in the region’s ecosystem.
Since being established in 2013, the Conservancy of Southwest Florida’s python programme has removed over 1,000 pythons from around 100 sq miles in southwest Florida.
Florida also runs an annual contest asking the public for help with hunting pythons. The “Python Challenge” will run from 5 to 14 August and is expected to draw around 600 participants from 25 different states.
Prizes include $2,500 (£2,050) for most snakes captured, and $1,500 for the longest snake caught.
Last year’s winner captured 223 pythons, while the longest snake was 15 feet long. All snakes must be killed humanely.
BBC
Lion + Tiger = Liger
The liger is a hybrid cross between a male lion and a tigress. Thus, it has parents with the same genus but of different species. It is distinct from the similar hybrid tigon. It is the largest of all known extant felines.
Ligers enjoy swimming, which is a characteristic of tigers, and are very sociable like lions. Ligers exist only in captivity because the habitats of the parental species do not overlap in the wild. Historically, when the Asiatic Lion was prolific, the territories of lions and tigers did overlap and there are legends of ligers existing in the wild. Notably, ligers typically grow larger than either parent species, unlike tigons which tend to be about as large as a female tiger and is the cross between a male tiger and a female lion.
The liger is often believed to represent the largest known cat in the world. Males reach a total length of 3 to 3.5 m, meaning they are larger than large Siberian tiger males.
Jungle Island, an interactive animal theme park in Miami, is home to a liger named Hercules, the largest non-obese liger, who is recognised by the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest living cat on Earth, weighing over 410 kg (904 lb).
Hercules
How Ligers are made
I don’t think this is a rape. The Tiger is just submissive, I think.
Wildlife Crossings around the World
Rapid deforestation and excessive human intervention into wildlife habitat has lead to frequent straying of wild animals into human habitation. Intrusion into wildlife habitat typically occurs due to illegal encroachment and also when roads, railroads, canals, electric power lines, and pipelines penetrate and divide wildlife habitat. Wild animals attempting to cross roads often find themselves in front of speeding vehicles.
Road mortality has significantly impacted a number of prominent species in the United States and elsewhere, including white-tailed deer, Florida panthers, and black bears. According to a study made in 2005, nearly 1.5 million traffic accidents involving deer occur each year in the United States that cause an estimated $1.1 billion in vehicle damage. In addition, species that are unable to migrate across roads to reach resources such as food, shelter and mates experiences reduced reproductive and survival rates.
Wildlife overpass in Banff National Park. Photo: Joel Sartore
One way to minimize human-wildlife conflict is to construct wildlife crossings such as bridges and underpasses that allow animals to cross human-made barriers safely. The first wildlife crossings were constructed in France during the 1950s. Since then, several European countries including the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, and France have been using various crossing structures to reduce the conflict between wildlife and roads. In the Netherlands alone there are more than 600 tunnels installed under major and minor roads including the longest “ecoduct” viaduct, near Crailo that runs 800 meters.
Wildlife crossings have also become increasingly common in Canada and the United States. The most recognizable wildlife crossings in the world are found in Banff National Park in Alberta where the national park is bisected by a large commercial road called the Trans-Canada Highway. To reduce the effect of the four lane highway, 24 vegetated overpasses and underpasses were built to ensure habitat connectivity and protect motorists. These passes are used regularly by bears, moose, deer, wolves, elk, and many other species.
In the United States, thousands of wildlife crossings have been built in the past 30 years, including culverts, bridges, and overpasses. These have been used to protect Mountain Goats in Montana, Spotted Salamanders in Massachusetts, Bighorn Sheep in Colorado, Desert Tortoises in California, and endangered Florida Panthers in Florida.
The Netherlands contains an impressive number of wildlife crossings – over 600, that includes both underpasses and ecoducts. The Veluwe, a 1000 square kilometers of woods, heathland and drifting sands, the largest lowland nature area in North Western Europe, contains nine ecoducts, 50 meters wide on average, that are used to shuttle wildlife across highways that transect the Veluwe. The Netherlands also boasts the world’s longest ecoduct-wildlife overpass called the Natuurbrug Zanderij Crailo. This massive structure, completed in 2006, is 50 m wide and over 800 m long and spans a railway line, business park, river, roadway, and sports complex.
Ecoduct Borkeld in the Netherlands.
Banff.
Ecoduct Kikbeek in Hoge Kempen National Park, Belgium.
Banff
Elephant underpass in Kenya.
What lies beneath…. Diver braves the waters to swim with deadly 26-foot anaconda
- Swiss diver Franco Banfi went to the Mato Grosso region of Brazil to capture these amazing close-up of enormous anaconda snakes in their natural habitat
- These underwater beasts feed on rodents, birds and fish, lurking close to surface coiled and ready to strike
It lurks just inches below the surface coiled and ready to strike – and yet you wouldn’t know it was there.
These remarkable images show the enormous 26-foot (eight metre) anacondas of Mato Grosso in Brazil searching for prey in the murky depths.
They were captured by brave diver and snake enthusiast Franco Banfi, 53, who joined the beasts in their natural habitat armed only with a camera.
Ready to strike: Brave diver and snake enthusiast Franco Banfi captured this image of an enormous anaconda snake lurking beneath the surface of a river in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil
Hunting: This anaconda scans the surface of the water looking for prey such as mice, fish or birds
Enormous: This coiled anaconda was about eight metres in length. Swiss diver Franco Banfi captured the photographs on a ten-day visit to the Mato Grosso do Sul region in Brazil
In another shot, Banfi gets up close to a huge anaconda that is lying on the riverbank and glistening in the ferocious tropical heat.
Thankfully for the photographer, it had just gobbled up a capybara rodent and wasn’t interested in devouring him as a second course.
Banfi, a father-of-two from Switzerland, said: ‘As the snake had just eaten it didn’t take much interest in us.
‘Everything is possible but I don’t think it would have eaten us. I was very close, I could have touched it if I wanted to.’
Time for your close-up: Banfi was able to reach out and touch this massive anaconda sunbathing on the riverbank having devoured a capybara rodent
He saw six different female anaconda snakes on his ten-day trip to the Mato Grosso do Sul region, right in the heart of South America.
The region is known for its diverse natural beauty and attracts thousands of visitors every year.
The name literally means ‘Thick Forest of the South’ and it’s easy to see why.
Banfi added: ‘At the first moment it’s scary because you don’t know the animal and everybody says it’s dangerous.
‘But after a while you understand that nothing happens if you respect the snake.
‘I have never been so close to a snake like this before. But I think a small poisonous snake is more scary than a big one. At least you can see the anacondas clearly and know what they’re doing.’
Say cheese! Banfi, 53, goes up close to take an underwater shot of one of the anacondas. He saw six huge female snakes during his time in Brazil
On the prowl: The bright sunlight suggests this anaconda is close to the surface and about to attack
Elegant: This smaller snake glides through the waters
This story was originally published by the Daily Mail in 2012.
Ornery Orangutan Grabs Hold of Man at Zoo and Refuses to Release Him
A wild video circulating online shows the moment that a man at a zoo gets too close to an orangutan and winds up in the mighty creature’s unrelenting grasp. According to a local media report, the unsettling incident occurred on Monday at the Kasang Kulim Zoo in the Indonesian city of Pekanbaru. Hoping to produce something viral for his Instagram account, a foolhardy young man named Hasanal Arifin managed to achieve his goal in a manner that he now undoubtedly regrets as the video of his jaw-dropping encounter at the facility has spread like wildfire online as a reminder that it is rather unwise to get too close to the animals while visiting a zoo.
In the footage, Arifin can be seen extending his hands towards the great ape in a somewhat taunting fashion and then soon finds that the ‘joke’ is on him as the creature reaches through the bars of its cage and grabs hold of the young man’s shirt. With an unnerving look of determination, the orangutan begins slowly pulling the terrified zoo patron towards the cage, while Arifin yells out for help and, no doubt, wonders what will become of him should the mighty creature win the worrisome tug of war. Responding to his cries, a second individual runs over to the scene, but wisely keeps his distance from the aggressive creature after it swats him away.
Amazingly, this was just the beginning of Arifin’s ordeal as the orangutan releases its tenuous grip on his shirt in favor of something more solid: the young man’s leg! Wrapping its long arms around the appendage, the ape refuses to let go, even when the aspiring social media star eventually gets lifted off the ground and turned sideways against the cage as his friend tries to pull him away from the ornery orangutan. Eventually Arifin manages to be yanked away from the angry animal just as the creature appears to be poised to take a bite out of his bare foot. Fortunately, he was able to escape the situation without being injured and, one presumes, with a newfound respect for the pugilistic primate.
Since being posted to social media on Tuesday, the young man’s video has quickly gone viral around the world, though his hopes for online fame appear to have been dashed since most media outlets have failed to identify him as the man who tangled with the orangutan. Be that as it may, one Indonesian website did place Arifin at the center of the misadventure and he has since expressed deep regret for his ape-based antics at the zoo, offering an apology to the facility for crossing the guardrails in order to get closer to the creature. While its uncertain if the young man will get into any trouble for the ill-advised viral video, one suspects that the sheer terror that he felt while in the orangutan’s grip may be punishment enough.
The MarkoZen Blog 