Ask Lemmy

A couple, both cold bird homicides. Each time the victims were one of these bastards.

One morning I wake up to the sound of one's infuriating chirping outside the window. It doesn't stop. I get up and go to the window to swat it or something. Open the window, look down, and one of these awesome bastards is standing on top of a pinned noisy miner, and looks right up at me like, "You didn't see nothin'." I raise my hands and back away from the window, the chirping starts up again and slowly fades and stops. Turns out currawongs will often prey on smaller birds and if those smaller birds are noisy miners, I'm cool with it.

The other time was a noisy miner picking on a crow that was trying to eat. The miner keeps swopping it until the crow catches it, gets on top, and drags it over to a puddle. Same eerie audio of a noisy miner going nuts, then suddenly silence as the crow just sticks its head underwater, stays standing on it until the thing's lifeless, and goes back to eating.

Tiger in India.

She did nothing violent. I was watching from a tour 4wd from about 40m away. She was taking a drink on the other side of a creek for about 30s. Then lifted her head, looked at us and turned and loped up the steep hill behind her.

The effortless power of her acceleration of a body that big.

I was once hiking a mountain in New Mexico, and had a standoff with a vicious, off-leash and in-tact dog. I tried slowly backing down, but it kept advancing any ground I gave it. The owner for some reason refused to come down off the mountain to get his dog, until I yelled at him I would bash the dog's head in, and he'd still be on the hook for any injuries I sustained while doing it.

Invading Ukraine

If we're including wildlife shows the scariest thing I've seen is on an old one called Last Feast of the Crocodiles which is set around a water hole that goes into drought.

These baboons lure a baby deer away from its mother by pretending to be friendly and then kill it so they can drink its blood. There's just something that bothers me way more than normal predators doing normal things.

In person or generally?

Because the most horrifying thing I've seen but not in person was a deer eating human corpses on a body farm.

A body farm is a scientific study where corpses are left out, exposed to the elements, and the decomposition is measured over time.

If you ever read the news and saw a story about a body being recovered and the officials estimated that they died x months ago, that's because of body farms...

But then this happens (NSFL pictures):

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/deer-eating-human-remains-decomposing-body-texas-state-university-journal-forensic-scientists-a7725386.html

Seeing two horses fighting. The sheer size of them is enough to scare me, but getting aggresive biting and kicking was something else.

On an episode of BBC's: Planet Earth I saw an eagle grab a small goat, carry it off a cliff, and dropped it. Effective to be sure and kind of clever for the bird, but terrifying to watch.

Probably wild/feral dogs stalking me through the bush. Which is scary because I've seen one ripping out the throats of sheep.

Pitbull/mastiff crosses that people use for pighunting (knife and dogs method) get lost in the bush sometimes and can form packs.

Aggressive Shih-Tzu owner had stopped to chat with Cane Corso owners that kept them chained up out front while they sat on their porch, and her little bastard got bold. Corsos snapped their chains and were shaking him like a paper plate. The sound it made as they ripped into him… Then suddenly silence and grunting from the neighbors struggling to pry the Corsos off. Somehow little shithead survived.

A friend was on house arrest, staying in a guest bedroom at his uncle’s house. He had a small black cat with white paws named Psyche, but the rule was Psyche had to stay in his room.

One day Psyche got out and ran down two flights of stairs to the basement. I went down for him to get her and bring her back up. I coaxed her toward me, then I scruffed her and was holding her scruff (also supporting under her) tightly as I walked back upstairs.

I thought to myself “I’m being too hard on this cat” and I relaxed the grip I had on her scruff just slightly. She saw this as weakness and immediately went into battle mode. The moment I relaxed my grip slightly, she took one swipe at my other hand with her paw and then bolted when I dropped her.

The thing that terrified me was this: her paw went through my hand like an scoop through ice cream. All the claws worked as one to just scoop a little chunk of flesh out of the pad of my hand. Like, it was a 3D wound.

It was the first time I understood what a cat’s paw is. Those individual claws aren’t the weapon. The paw is the weapon. And when a cat’s paw is swiping, my flesh is like whipped cream in its path.

My dog chased an industrial lawnmower, thing had spinning open blades on the back

Raven opened my cage and ate my pet parakeet

Some friends provoked a massive swarm of bees near their home in response to a home invasion. I'm not complaining about the outcome, but let's just say if we lived in the Harry Potter universe, that would've been the first day I could see thestrals.

A large dog rip my cousins pomeranian to pieces

A moose just stood there being a moose. Moose are terrifying.

Elk in road. No lights, no moon, no other cars headlights. Like a big furry wall just showed up in my headlights. I chose a direction to swerve and now I'm not allowed to test my luck ever again.

The actual scariest stuff pretty much boils down to aggressive dogs being aggressive dogs.

For example: I saw a woman lose control of her pit-mix. The dog rushed over to one of our neighbors, unprovoked, and immediately latched on to her leg and started thrashing it. The dog's owner was freaking out screeching which seemed to agitate the dog rather than dissuade it from attacking. There was so much blood, but I think the only long term physical damage was scars. However, I only ever saw the victim once or twice after that, she stopped going out on walks after that event.

If you're willing to stretch the definition of scariest and seen:

Deer are super annoying sometimes. One of their behaviors is that they make a super loud snort-whistle noise when alarmed. So if you're outside and unaware of their presence, and especially if you're not expecting a super loud and almost alien-like snort-whistle coming from the woods right next to you, there's a good chance it's going to startle the crap out of you.