It's A Jungle Out There

And you humans are on the bottom rung of Darwin's ladder s'far as I can tell. F'instance, while a cougar is pretty much like your average fe-lyin', aside from the size issue, I sure as hell wouldn't relish the experience of meetin' one of 'em face to face. Not that I couldn't handle it, of course, since I already have experience dealin' with coyotes, rattlesnakes, great horned owls, and a loose bull tramplin' the yard.

Future Darwin award winners, tho', seem to consider any big ole' cougar and an itty bitty kitty cat equally beautiful…

"With a crowd of anxious neighbors waiting at the end of an alley…wildlife officers Thursday afternoon tranquilized a 110-pound mountain lion spotted relaxing under a porch in the backyard of a Boulder home. […] "Wow," neighbors gasped… "Beautiful," one woman whispered.

Reminds me of that open-the-Ark-of-the-Covenant scene from Raider of the Lost Ark

Ya' also seem to think they have "…a really nice, gentle face…"

"I'm expecting like a bobcat sort of thing, like an oversized cat," [Linda Dyck] said. "All of a sudden, it's right in front of me. "It was huge…. It was jumping. It was running. […] "For a split second it just entered my mind, when he first came out, that he was so big and I thought, maybe, is this safe?" Dyck said. "But I looked at his face, and he had a really nice, gentle face…"

Yeah, right. Ya' might wanna' spend a split second rememberin' those reeeeaaally sharp teeth inside too.

Just in case the real thing isn't enough, ya' can always go lookin' for the frog that thinks it's a fe-lyin'.

"Amphibian horror" isn't a movie genre, but on this evidence perhaps it should be. Harvard biologists have described a bizarre, hairy frog with cat-like extendable claws."

Definitely not your kinder, gentler frog face.

And across the pond in Less-than-Great Britain, they're dealin' with a rogue preditor, unarmed, dangerous, and on the lam at 4 mph.

"If you [him], do not approach him. He may be unarmed but he is certainly dangerous. Rupert, who has attacked children and dogs, is on the run… The sprightly 60-year-old is always one step ahead of the law… "He has quite a temper and has been known to bite children plus dogs and other animals," said [Joyce Thomas]… "I would advise people to exercise extreme caution when going near him."

posted by Harrison at 10:46 PM