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How does a tiny box jellyfish, with no brain and little control over where it goes in the water, manage to kill a full-grown man? What harm have hippos been known to inflict on humans, and why? What makes our closest cousin, the chimpanzee, the most dangerous of all apes to encounter in the wild? In this elegantly illustrated, often darkly funny compendium of animal predation, Gordon Grice, hailed by Michael Pollan as "a fresh, strange, and wonderful new voice in American nature writing," presents findings that are by turns surprising, humorous, and horrifying. Personally obsessed by both the menace and beauty of animals since he was six years old and a deadly cougar wandered onto his family's farm, Grice now reaps a lifetime of study in this unique survey--at once a reading book and a resource.
[...]... limit their own numbers The female bites the male in the neck while they mate, delivering a mortal wound The young, in turn, eat their way out of the womb, killing their mother The wise gods supplied vipers with these habits to keep them from overrunning the earth These ideas are wrong, of course, but sound observations lurk behind them The mating of the vipers in the Mediterranean does involve a lot of. .. bucketful of water, and a new set of carrion beetles came out in a panic, as if they had slept through the rst dousing They struggled over each other to stay above the surface The boy stared at the troubled water, the skull gazing back from the bottom of the bucket The bugs help him go back to the earth,” the boy said, ngering a toy sixshooter As I walked to the kitchen the next morning, led by the smell of. .. told the story, pausing three times to light the recalcitrant cigarette He’d woken one night to the screams of the pink hog The cougar had it by the hind leg and was trying to drag it through the break in the fence Virgil red a shotgun in the air to scare the cat o I could see a deep black seam of healing wound on the hog’s leg I asked whether the cat had been back since “Not up here close to the house,”... road The cattle, with their hides of rust and cream, hustled ahead of us On our left was a fenced pasture; on our right was a bank of heavy brush The road changed abruptly from hard-packed dirt to a patch where frequent runo from a hill had left soft, smooth undulations of dirt On this softer ground the cattle kicked up a little dust It was on this stretch I spotted the pugmarks of the cougar They... cougar They dappled the road for several yards, obscured in two places where the cattle had crossed them A good rain had fallen about two hours earlier The tracks must have been made since then Soon we had the cattle in their pasture Virgil needed a minute to wrestle the broken gate shut Suddenly we both looked toward the brush, then at each other, then back at the brush I scanned the ditch tangled with... reported the conversation to me: the boy asking how the bones “fell out” of the animal, the uncle trying to explain death as “going back to the earth.” Now they huddled again, apparently discussing the pronghorn skull and its colonizers I went to work cleaning the skull and forgot about the little boy When I looked up I found him standing on the porch above me, staring I had just plunged the skull... been there in place of bison and mustang herds The lives of my ancestors were riddled with ghost towns and vanished homesteads, but here they had made the earth yield All of my grandparents were farmers, and that occupation was understood to call for a kind of integrity others couldn’t muster But we were a family falling away from the land My mother would have been happier in town My father liked the. .. disemboweled and literally defaced One of the searchers who found the body assumed he was looking at a murder scene—until he spotted a cougar ve yards from the body When I looked into the matter further, I found that the relation between humans and cougars traced an odd U-shaped pattern From the earliest European settlements in the Americas, the animal was considered dangerous In the late nineteenth and early... Etling found no records of fatal attacks between 1949 and 1971, and only a few in the decades on either side Then, starting in the late 1980s, predatory attacks on humans became an undeniable reality There were a dozen fatal attacks between 1988 and 2001 Naturalists had been in the habit of blaming the rare fatalities on the aberrant behavior of rabid or starving animals But these new cases made it... and others Among the species potentially aggressive toward us, each population varies in its familiarity with, and response to, humans In North American wolves, the cultural distrust of humans seems to be holding rm A wolf will often go miles out of its way to avoid the smell of a human being Among cougars, the case is di erent, because they are less social and spend part of their youth, when their . DANGERS THE REPTILES AND BIRDS 10. THE SNAKES 11. THE CROCODILIANS 12. THE LIZARDS 13. THE BIRDS THE ARTHROPODS AND WORMS 14. THE ARACHNIDS AND MYRIAPODS 15. THE. MYRIAPODS 15. THE INSECTS 16. THE WORMS OTHER MAMMALS 17. THE HOOFED MAMMALS 18. THE ELEPHANTS 19. THE RODENTS 20. THE BATS 21. A MISCELLANY OF MINOR MAMMAL DANGERS 22.