lordpasternack wrote:You could have asked him if he'd be so gracious as to test his "instant adaption" hypothesis on himself...
Well we DID offer to help him test his "big predatory animals are scared of humans" nonsense. I offered to donate the air fare to Western Australia, so he could go paddling in the waters of Kakadu National Park and say hello to a couple of nice life forms known to my brother over there.
Not too long after my brother emigrated to Australia, he secured a position driving those big roadtrains they have out there (this is circa 1971). One of his scheduled freight haulage runs took him up to the top end of Queensland and through the Northern Territory. After an overnight stop at a truck café, he woke up to rejoin the truck, when he found that his path to the cab was barred. Seeing what was in his way, he headed back to the truck café at a speed that would have done Linford Christie proud, and buttonholed the receptionist. The conversation went something like this:
"There's a bloody huge crocodile beside my truck!"
"Oh, we get those a lot here, let's go and take a look ..."
* The two walk outside *
"Oh, I wouldn't worry too much about that one, it's a juvenile."
"JUVENILE!?!?!? That bastard's fourteen feet long!"
"Yeah, it's a Saltie. They grow big".
"Er,
how big?"
"Big male can reach, what ... thirty three feet ..."
"THIRTY THREE FEET!?!?!?!"
Yeah, they tip the scales at around two to three tons when they're that big."
"So how am I going to get the truck started?"
"Simple, just walk round the back, get in the passenger side, shut the door. I'd be quick about shutting the door though, that one will have your leg off if you wake it up".
"How long do these things take to wake up?"
"Thirty or forty minutes. Bit quicker on a warm day. That one hasn't warmed up yet. You've got time to get out. Oh, the room and breakfast is six dollars, by the way."
"Here's ten, keep the change".
"Sure you don't want me to go get some change?"
"I just want to get as far away from THAT as possible!"
"Just remember, you'll meet more of them if you're going through the top end of the country ..."
Oh, we had fun showing Byers some pics of what happens when crocs go bad in that thread. I found a nice one - pic of a Nile Crocodile with some guy's arm in its mouth. Only someone with the level of disconnect from reality associated with Byers could possibly continue posting the shit he did after I put that picture up on the forums. What a total twonk. It got even better when people started uploading YouTube video clips of bear attacks, lion attacks (including one where a lion charged full bore at a guy wielding a sod-off big hunting rifle, and kept going amid the hail of bullets until it made contact), a tiger attacking some unfortunate Mahout on an elephant in India, and I found a nice shot of what a polar bear (you know, supposedly "scared to the point of white hair") can do to a two ton walrus. When you've seen one of those bears haul an adult walrus out of the water by the neck with
one paw, smack it to death with one swipe of the other paw, and turn it into a sea of blood and guts in about 45 seconds as it tucks in, only someone deranged to the point of needing a padded cell would think of trying to scare one off by jangling car keys at it. I wouldn't want to be in the vicinity of a hungry polar bear unless I had something useful in the way of defensive armament - at the bare minimum, a fully loaded AK-47 with dum-dum ammunition.
Oh, and speaking of the Saltwater Crocs in Oz, you
know you're dealing with something dangerous, when a country as laid back as Australia puts up notices near beaches with the following words:
DO NOT VENTURE ONTO THIS BEACH
MAN EATING CROCODILES PRESENT
complete with a nice little diamond featuring a cartoon of someone being bitten in two by one of these fuckers.
One example being:
Road signs include:
Then there's this one:
Meanwhile, this one will raise a few laughs ... check out the
name of the location.
