These may seem like the exaggerations of people who are unfamiliar with the nonnative wildlife in question, or your suspicions may be aroused by the fact that the Sun states on their website that they pay money for stories. But the danger was confirmed by a professional naturalist who warned about the chipmunks: “They will stop at nothing to get what they want.”
Other small animals that seem friendly and charming may deliberately soften people up before victimizing them. A magpie in a German village started out by making friendly overtures, perching on people’s shoulders and being fed nuts, before the situation took a darker turn. First, the bird made friends with the local postwoman only to steal her ballpoint pen; then, the situation escalated, as one resident described:She decided she wasn’t getting enough and just started taking what she wanted. Now she flies straight into my living room through the window, eats my marzipan potatoes and chocolates on the table and sits on the sofa.
GRAND THEFT ANIMAL
Our vehicles aren’t safe from animals either: both bears and baboons, for example, seem to be increasingly targeting cars as well as houses. In 2009, deputies in Colorado responded to reports of a car theft in progress to find a bear in the driver’s seat, rummaging around in the passenger compartment. To make matters worse, their reaction was to open the car door to help the bear escape—after making sure to take photographs first. So the bear gets the peanut butter sandwich left in the car and Internet fame, and how does it thank the owner?
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PUP AND PRIMATE PREMEDITATION
Animals that steal food aren’t necessarily overwhelmed by hunger and unable to overcome an impulse to grab—sometimes there’s quite a bit more planning involved.
Staff at an animal shelter in Britain came to work one morning to find a canine party in progress: The kitchen had been raided of treats and toys and the dogs were running loose, the doors of their kennels somehow unlocked. The even bigger surprise was that it happened again and again, with more dogs joining the fun each time. When the caretakers set up surveillance cameras, they found that a dog called Red had figured out how to put his teeth through the bars of his kennel to release the spring-loaded catch on the door—and then, once out, he’d do the same for his friends and they’d raid the cupboards and spend the night carousing.
And those South African baboons who break into cars don’t waste time trying all the doors to see which are unlocked—they’ve come up with a more efficient approach. They listen for the beeping of remote door locks. Says a Cape Town city official, “They’re waiting for the sound of the car alarm. If they don’t hear the ‘tweet tweet’ they make for the door.”
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It left a foul-smelling “present” on the front seat.
The Toyota was trashed, with its air bags, seats and stereo torn to shreds. It’s a total loss.
Ominously, bears seem to be making progress in their understanding of how cars work. In 2010, when officers arrived to investigate a car honking and making a commotion, it turned out to be a bear who had managed this time to drive the vehicle over a hundred feet from its original parking place.
Incidents of this type will no doubt continue, since the police response was again to open the doors and assist the culprit to escape. However, even where authorities have taken a harder line, there’s been little progress, despite perpetrators who are well known by name. In South Africa, gangs of baboon have learned to open doors to steal food and valuables from parked cars. A particular gang leader by the name of Fred is an expert, as described by an official tasked with tracking the troop:He’ll hit four or five cars in like five minutes. Fred’s operation is to open car doors. He leaves normally with a handbag. Until he’s satisfied he’s got all the food, don’t try to get the bag back.
The baboons will attack if confronted; Fred has bitten people—and he’s a sexist pig as well:Shouts and whistles are used, but in tougher baboonhoods like Simon’s Town, whips are cracked and crackers set off to move apes back. There are no female monitors as the baboons have proven not to listen to women.
FOOTWEAR FETISH
Food is a necessity, but that’s hardly the case with many other things that animals steal. Sure, maybe the monkey who stole five pairs of eyeglasses from an office in India needed them. It’s probably hard for a monkey to get an appointment for an eye exam, so he had to try several pairs to get one that was the right prescription. And in some other cases, if the perps were planning to resell the items, the theft might make some kind of sense. But if that were the case, the porcine and canine diamond thieves in Yorkshire, Maryland, probably shouldn’t have swallowed the goods. Likewise, dogs steal money fairly regularly, and though you’ d think it would be better to exchange it for some tasty steak, they always seem to eat the cash itself, like a dog in North Carolina who gobbled up a whole $400.
In fact, animals steal lots of stuff that they have no practical use for. A fox already has a fur coat, so what’s its excuse for assaulting two people to steal a sweater on a ninety-degree August day in Charlottesville, Virginia? Even more inexplicable is the fox in Germany who took over a hundred pairs of shoes, including “muddy hiking shoes, wet Wellingtons, steelcapped workman’s boots, flipflops and old slippers,” from doorsteps and front porches in the middle of the night. And when her collection was discovered and people took their shoes back, she stole more to replace them.
Elsewhere, cats have stolen whole collections of human garments and accessories. One in Seattle amassed a collection of thirty gardening gloves and his owners put out a bucket where people could come and look for their missing property. The neighbors reportedly thought the situation was funny, but what they didn’t realize is that gloves may be just the first step on a slippery slope.
A cat named Oscar in Portswood, Southampton, England, started out with gardening gloves too, but then he moved on to more disturbing items. When reported on in July 2010 he had dozens of socks, several types of gloves, a knee-pad, a paint roller—and a collection of ladies’ and children’s underwear. Oscar brings home as many as ten items a day, and his owners seem to believe that this disturbing revelation about their losses will be a comfort to Oscar’s victims:If any readers in the Portswood area are missing the said items of underwear it would be good to put their minds at rest that it’s only a cat pinching and not someone more unpleasant.
NO RESPECT
Some might object to making a big deal out of an animal stealing a few old gardening gloves and shoes. Don’t be so materialistic, right?
But some of these thefts cause bigger problems. In New Zealand, a Scottish man lost his passport when a kea parrot stole his bag from the luggage compartment of a bus. Stranded far from home without the document, the man had to wait over a month and pay hundreds of dollars for a replacement:“Being Scottish, I’ve got a sense of humour so I did take it with humour but obviously there is one side of me still raging,” he said. “My passport is somewhere out there in Fiordland. The kea’s probably using it for fraudulent claims or something.”
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PARTNERS IN CRIME
The impulse to ignore animal crimes is so extreme that human criminals can use it to their advantage. When a plant store in Texas had a series of thefts, they installed a security camera, and found that the culprit who had stolen dozens of plants, flowers, and garden statues was a monkey. But the shop owner declined to press charges because she found the situation “humorous,” despite the fact that the monkey was clearly handing off the goods to a person on the other side of the fence.
A common and highly effective animal coconspirator is the pigeon. No one takes much notice of this humble bird, and its ability to fly gives its human accomplices access to otherwise hard-to-reach places. Recently police in Columbia captured a pigeon smuggling marijuana and cocaine into a prison. The police commander commented, “This is a new case of criminal ingenuity,” but clearly he just hasn’t been paying attention. Two years previously, Brazilian police discovered that pigeons were being used to
smuggle cellphones into a jail, and before that, a pigeon was taken into custody after smuggling heroin into a prison in Bosnia.
Not everyone is as inattentive to the potential pigeon menace as the Columbians had been. In 2008, alert Iranian authorities arrested a number of pigeons near a nuclear facility on suspicion of spying. Asked to comment, one diplomat told Sky News, “It’s clear there has been some sort of coo in Tehran.”
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And some of these crimes are downright disrespectful. A cemetery in Michigan that decorated the graves of almost a thousand fallen soldiers for Memorial Day was struck by a mystery thief: Many of the flags were taken, leaving just bare sticks behind. The culprit was revealed when a squirrel stole another flag right under the nose of the cemetery’s superintendent.
Elsewhere, at a drive-through wildlife park in England, baboons that tired of merely taking car mirrors and wiper blades came up with a new entertainment: They learned how to open rooftop luggage boxes. The contents can’t be of much practical use to the monkeys, so no doubt the real value is in the reaction of the victims. As the park manager observes significantly, “Let’s face it, nobody wants to see a baboon running up a tree with their underwear.”
TWO
Assault, Running Amok, and Arson
WHILE ANIMAL THIEVES HAVE MOSTLY FLOWN AND CRAWLED beneath society’s radar, animal violence does a better job of getting our attention. In fact a whole genre of reality TV has sprung up to document the more gruesome creature crimes.
While most of us are at little risk of losing a limb to a crocodile if we follow the most elementary safety precautions, in many cases, the victims of animal attacks are innocently going about their own business. A schoolteacher in an English village was riding her horse along a lane in June 2009 when an attacker came out of nowhere:“I heard a loud sound and felt a blow to my head and my helmet,” she said. “It was quite a hard blow—I could see stars afterwards.”
Other victims of the attacking buzzard that was going after joggers, cyclists, and dog walkers were not so fortunate to be wearing helmets when they were assaulted.
Innocent recreational activities can be even more dangerous where larger animals are common, and they don’t have to be predators. An Australian researcher collected reports of fifteen unprovoked attacks by kangaroos in the space of two years. In one case, a former football player, probably no easy target, was punched unconscious. In another, a kangaroo chased a dog into a pond and tried to drown it, then went after the owner as he tried to rescue his pet. He described his resulting injuries:A large gash above my right eye—all that blood left me unable to see. Then there’s several large and deep scratches on my face, my neck, my back and chest, which are from the roo trying to push me down into the water.
A study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicated that about twenty people a year are killed in the United States by cows. These allegedly placid bovines ram, gore, trample, and kick people in the head, as well as crushing them against walls; in one case, a cow administered a fatal dose of antibiotic by knocking down a victim with a syringe in his pocket. A closer look at a few of these incidents uncovered some alarming details:■ In about three quarters of the cases “the animal was deemed to have purposefully struck the victim.”
■ One of the murderous bulls had been hand-raised and bottlefed by the victim and his family.
■ And finally, watch your back: in at least one case, the victim was attacked from behind.
PICK ON SOMEONE YOUR OWN SIZE
Smallness doesn’t stop an animal from going after humans, as demonstrated by the home-invading chipmunks in the last chapter. In Germany, a ten-year-old girl was climbing a tree when a squirrel attacked her. She had to be rescued by firemen when it chased her up into branches almost thirty feet up and she couldn’t get down on her own.
Keeping your kids out of potential squirrel territory isn’t enough to keep them safe, either: They have gone after children on playgrounds. In Florida, a squirrel attacked a three-year-old on a swing at a day care center, sending him to the hospital; a state trooper who responded was also treated for injuries. The same squirrel was believed to be responsible for at least seven attacks, with victims that included another child and a man sitting on a park bench. And in San Jose, a squirrel actually ran right inside an elementary school classroom, sending a child and two adults to a hospital for treatment of scratches and bites.
Animals are unashamed to target other vulnerable populations as well. In Melbourne, Australia, a billy goat invaded the grounds of a nursing home. After leaving the sixty-year-old gardener with cuts to the head and arm, it knocked a seventy-year-old man onto the ground and butted him until pulled off by two police constables. And in England, a crow attacking people on a jogging trail confined itself to what it perhaps thought were the easiest marks: The bird only went after blonds.
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ANIMAL ARSONISTS
Animals can cause property damage with nothing but the tools nature has given them, and not just the obvious ones. For example, in 2009, cows did $100 worth of damage to a Tennessee home merely by sticking their heads through a fence and licking it, ripping off a screen window, cracking glass, and pulling down a gutter.
Some animals even seemingly commit arson. In Iowa, a goat started a fire that destroyed a home by knocking over a space heater, and in Washington, a rat chewed through the electrical cord of a jukebox at a VFW post and started a blaze that destroyed a collection of antique war memorabilia and caused over $1 million in damage. And sometimes the guilty party poses its own danger as well, as Pittsburgh-area firefighters found when they responded to a fire caused by a space heater:“The first initial report we got was that they found an elevator,” North Beaver Township Fire Chief Paul Henry said. “With the breathing apparatus on and the radio traffic that we got, it sounded like ‘elevator.’ I said, ‘No, there can’t be one in that building, I know that building,’ and they said, ‘No, an alligator.’ ”
Henry said that’s when he pulled his men out of the burning building.
However, the animals most likely to start fires are the ones closest to us. Cats on the countertop can do more than annoy, as one family in Washington State found when they were left temporarily homeless by a kitchen fire. Investigators determined that the blaze had originated from a toaster oven, which was found with its switch pressed. The owner said the cat had taken to sleeping on top of the appliance, and—although typically forgiving—had to admit that he “probably did some step aerobics” that had turned it on.
In fact, it’s estimated by the American Kennel Club (AKC) that nearly one thousand house fires a year are started by our own pets. Dogs do their share of damage, as well, and the AKC even recommends that dog owners remove or cover stove knobs when they are not in the kitchen, since turning on the stove is the cause of many of these fires.
That advice might have helped the owners of a dog in Wales that jumped up and turned on the switch under a chip cooker, starting a fire that resulted in £6,000 ($9, 700) in damages. Owner Paul Gregson theorizes that the dog was just looking for something to eat:Three-year-old Alfie is a liver-coloured, flat-coated retriever who Paul described as “very lively, bouncy and smelly.” He added: “The breed is a cross between a pointer and a red setter. They are slow to mature—if they mature at all. He exists to eat. He’s a walking stomach.”
Although owners of any type of dog should be wary of the risks, it’s possible that certain breeds may have more of a firebug tendency than others. One owner of a flat-coated retriever was unsurprised by Alfie’s story, given that her dog had once turned on the stove and filled the kitchen with gas. “This is why I have childproof knobs on all my burner knobs,” she said, echoing the AKC’s advice.
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NOT SAFE IN OUR BEDS
While journeying into the wilderness may put you at risk of assault by animals, you actually don’t even have to leave your own property. One woman in Queensland, Australia, was picking roses i
n her garden when a kangaroo pushed her to the ground and kicked, scratched, and bit her all over her body. An elderly lady in England was likewise in her yard when a vicious crow took advantage of her helpless position:I pulled my sunchair towards the light. As I sat down on it, it tipped up backwards. While my legs were up in the air this crow came down and started dive-bombing me and making screeching noises. It was like a horror movie. I got up and started running. I shouted “It’s after me,” and then I fell in the flower bed.
She escaped with just a sprained ankle, but was left shaken: “Scared would be an understatement,” she said. “I had to pour myself a brandy.”
Remaining indoors is no safer. We saw in the last chapter that our homes are not safe from animals looking for food, but even more frightening are invaders whose motives seem to be pure mayhem. In 2009, a couple in Australia was woken up by a kangaroo that had come in through a window and was jumping on their bed. By the time the man of the house wrestled the monster out the door, he had “scratched buttocks and shredded underpants,” as well as holes gouged in his walls and furniture and two traumatized children.
It’s also worth noting that animals are much less forgiving than people of such incursions onto their home turf. The man with the unexpected marsupial in his bed was content to shove the intruder outside and let it hop away. That kangaroo was luckier than the woman who went for a swim at her summer cottage in Wisconsin. She was unruffled by seeing one otter, but when two more appeared, she sensibly “felt uncomfortable and swam to shore.” Despite the fact that the woman almost immediately removed herself from their territory, the otters pursued her:She said she had her hands on the shore and legs in the water, “and there they were—one on the right leg and one on the left leg.”
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