Okay, there’s stupid (voting for a Democrat Socialist), very stupid (waterbombing Danny Trejo)… and then there’s ultra-stupid:
A Spanish tourist reportedly has been “trampled to death” by elephants in South Africa after he tried to get close to them to take pictures.
If you look up the word “pendejo” in the dictionary, that’ll be his pic you see, right above that of the Trejo Waterbomber.
I remember one time I was driving friends around the Kruger Park when we suddenly came upon a solitary elephant. I stopped, of course, at a distance of about thirty yards.
“Get a little closer!” urged one friend (American, first time in Africa, in fact I think it was the first time she’d ever left New England).
Of course, I refused.
“He’s just standing there,” she said.
“See how his ears are flapping?”
“I know, it’s so cute!”
“He’s warning us off,” I said, and put the minibus into reverse.
Then the elephant took three giant steps towards us, whereupon I tried my very best to break the world speed record for reversing a VW minibus down a dirt road. Even so, he got to within about ten yards of the bus before our acceleration took us clear. Fortunately, the road was straight and after a minute or so the elephant stopped, flapped his ears at us one more time, and exited stage right.
I took the opportunity to turn the bus around, and got the hell out of the area.
One of the others managed to get a single pic of Dumbo, right before he got on the road and decided to shoo us off.
(in the very left-hand bottom of the pic you can see the car windowsill, to give an idea of how close he was, no zoom lens)
Get out of the car? Close to a herd with calves?
I guess the Spanish guy felt that he knew all about elephants, having done the African River ride at DisneyWorld where the elephants frolic charmingly along the river banks, rather than trampling people to death.
Afterthought: phew, if the whole herd got in on the act as the report says, all that remained must have been some bloody mud with bone splinters, with pieces of El Stupido’s iPhone mixed in.
Is “Pendejo” the correct word? I was thinking more in terms of “Cabron”, but then I only have been exposed to Mexican Spanish. In any event, the man was a finalist for this year’s Darwin Award, in any language you want to express that.
Pendejo = dumbass.
I guess out West at Yellowstone and such a number of Californians have been injured and killed when they tried to get close to the fluffy cows. At the beginning of ChiCom flu season a few years back I was hoping people would conquer this disease but a few months in with the distancing, arrows on the floor, masks and such I started cheering for the disease. Now with the pet the fluffy cow season and such, I’m definitely cheering on the animals.
Get a good set of binoculars and enjoy animals from far away. they are only cute and cuddly in FICTION. In real life wild animals are, wait for it, W-I-L-D. they carry parasites and disease.
JQ:
We live in NW Wyoming and idiot tourists trying to get next to buffalo and either:
– Learning a hard lesson, or
– Not being able to ever learn anything again
Happens every darned year.
About the most Darwin-Awardish behavior we’ve seen was at a bear-jam in the road, where a couple of grizzlies were just off the side of the road on a hillside, with cars parked in the middle of both sides of the road (you learn that tourists will stop for chipmunks and mule deer, too). A pair of idiots armed with cameras got out of their cars. The bears noticed, and started ambling up the hill towards the woods. The tourists (that’s a cuss word around here, and these had KKKalifornia plates) started to follow the bears up the hill and the bears picked up the pace a little. These two idiots STARTED CHASING THE BEARS UP THE HILL. My wife and I both later admitted to each other that we wanted to provide advice to the bears, like, “Turn around and give ’em each a good swat”, but unfortunately for the average intelligence of the human race, the bears just disappeared into the woods.
I bought a 300mm lens and a 1.4x teleconverter for my DSLR last year giving me a 420mm equivalent lens. On a crop-sensor (APS-C) camera that’s equal to about a 12-power pair of binoculars, which lets me take pictures of big critters from a relatively safe distance. I’ve personally witnessed from ‘way too close how fast a big grizzly can move when it wants to, accelerating from 0-40 MPH in the space of about 4 big bounds and maintaining that speed (fortunately in the opposite direction) for a couple of hundred yards. For a big animal they’re unbelievably fast and agile. I gotta believe that elephants in the wild can move much, much faster than most people would expect, too.
Kim,
Look at the bright side.
His fiancée just got spared marrying a dumbass. Caught a real break there. She is free to find a smarter man…
I must be a bad person. When I first saw that story, my first thought was “is there video?”
In today’s world, there HAS to be.
Unless everybody was too busy screaming and waving their hands to hold a camera…
My mom told me last weekend that my lib dumbass brother and his daughter are going to Africa to “see gorillas”.
I’ll keep you appraised how the more money than sense crowd makes out. 😀
Wild animal. What part of WILD don’t you understand? Maybe if people saw pictures of “bloody mud and bone splinters” they’d keep their distance and respect the WILD animals.
I was once with the ex-wife and another couple at an out door safari place near San Antonio. Bought a couple of large cups of food to feed the friendlier animals. The second ones we came across were several Bison. One Bison’s face was big enough to FILL the open rear window of our rental car! Those things are huge! Definitely NOT fluffy cows. I didn’t want to drive off while its face was still in the window, even though the women in the back were cringing away from it because its nose was dripping snot. When it figured it wasn’t gonna get fed it went elsewhere, and I drove off. (I’ve always wondered what the rental car company people thought about when they cleaned the back seat.) Even though those weren’t exactly wild I didn’t want to piss ’em off.
It’s not the bison snot that would piss Avis off; it’s the pee stains from the women.
Well, I don’t know – if the bougie tourists want to assume that an animal that grew up sharing its neighborhood with crocodiles and lions (or wolves and grizzlies, pick your poison) is likely to have become by its upbringing “harmless”, “gentle”, and/or “friendly”, then I’m willing to have my assumptions about how such an environment may have nurtured said critter in its formative years corrected.
So far, though, the evidence does not support changing my priors.
There you go with all that scientific observations ;n facts ‘n stuff. Didn’t you EVER watch a Disney cartoon movie for The Truth?
Bison can be tamed and herded like cows – by men with a _lot_ of experience herding domesticated cattle, including bulls – but it’s a dangerous job. Even domesticated cattle are deadly if the herders lose control.
But the bison at Yellowstone are _not_ tamed. They were born in the middle of a buffalo herd, not in a barn surrounded by humans. They were raised by a buffalo mother, not humans. They’ve had only enough contact with humans to reduce their natural fear of us as predators. That makes them even more dangerous.