Nature Bats Last: post your terrifying animal stories here

my brothers and sisters were held hostage one childhood summer, by a large cock (male chicken). This was one crazy mother fucker, it would suddenly appear running full pelt, we would barely get the door closed again but this feckin velociraptor would slam into the filmsy porch at the back of the house. Raised feathers and hormonal rage, this frenzy would just stop time, it was terrifying. we would have to get our dad to fight it back so we could leave. lol

yeah my mom still talks about a particularly vicious rooster that was on a hippie commune farm in the 70a, I was 6 or 7 and I remember the grownups kept a big stick by the chicken coop to beat it off while they got the eggs. I remember being chased once but it never got me.

My godparents had a rooster; one day when I was about three, I went into the chicken coop and it jumped on me and pecked me on the top of my head. I ran back into the house screaming and bleeding, and my godfather stood up from the table, walked outside, grabbed the thing and decapitated it.

On another visit, I was trying to feed their pony an apple and I held it wrong (gripping it in my fingers rather than holding it outstretched in my palm) and the pony bit my fingers. The pony was allowed to live.

Maybe "terrifying" is overselling it a little, but when I was about eight or nine I was outside playing and had just walked over to the tree in our yard I really liked to climb. As I had just grabbed the limb above my head, I heard a noise and turned to see a horse (which seemed to be absolutely gigantic to my child eyes, but was probably just an average sized adult horse) galloping seemingly straight towards me. I swung my legs up and got up into the branches just as it ran right past the tree, knocking into the leaves of the branch I was sitting on, close enough that I could feel the rush of air on my legs.

Now we lived on the very edge of town, our side of the road was fairly widely spaced single family houses, but just across was a few farmhouses and some cornfields. So it wasn't impossible to imagine happening, but I was also not aware of any neighbors that had horses, nor of any nearby stables.

I sat in the tree and watched it run through a few more yards towards a copse of trees and weeded area that backed up to some train tracks and eventually a 3M warehouse. Certain that it was gone, I finally climbed out of the tree to breathlessly tell my mom about my seeming brush with death, only to have her insist that I was playing a prank on her. Fortunately a guy came to our neighborhood about an hour later, knocking on doors to ask if we'd seen his horse. Turns out he had been about a mile or so down the road when the trailer he was hauling the horse in had gotten a flat. The guy's son had let the horse out to wait in the ditch while it got fixed and got spooked when a passing semi blew its horn and took off hard enough to pull the reins out of the kid's hands.

He did find his horse in the field behind the 3M warehouse about twenty minutes later.

That’s an interesting story.

It reminded me of an event in my life. My friend Marty's family also had several horses in addition to the aggressive geese and the german shepherd. My favorite was Frosty, a light gray horse with a dark mane who was very calm. Marty and I rode out properly with saddles a lot together, and Frosty was always the horse he let me choose.

We decided to ride him together bareback in the corral one day when I was twelve. Frosty meandered under a low branch and we both fell off. I fell first and Marty on top of me. I broke my humerus clean through and ended up in the hospital for 3 weeks in traction. Marty and Frosty were both blameless, but the realization that my arm was fucked was terrifying at the time.

Last summer I dived into the bay and hit a leopard shark with my hand. I wasn't particularly terrified but I think he/she was.

My wife had a horse who would regularly run under low branches to unseat her.

somehow I missed remy's astonishing post about the Hannibal Lecter dog, wow

saw that post about the dachsund, my brother had two of them and I didn't like them.

My second favorite dog ever after trixie, the boxer/spaniel mix who was my companion throughout childhood, is a miniature long-haired dachsund who friends care for. She is so shy and sweet. It was hard for her to warm up to me at first, but when she did I fell in love with her, and having her in my lap feels so good

My other friends have a small poodle. She is friendly and always wants to sit next to me on the sofa, but if you touch her under her neck she growls and bites you. I didn't know that at first. When she did it to me it was kind of shocking. It wasn't enough draw blood but it hurt and in the moment she seemed feral. She immediately pushed her head into my side to show remorse though. Her instinctive response and then her realization and reaction were astonishing to me and made me love her more. I have learned not to pet her under her neck

Trixie was scary to look at and the mailman was afraid of her, but she loved humans, never barked or showed any aggression. She would kill cats on sight though, which was kind of freaky

After Trixie died we got a cat, named Girlie Girlie, from the Guru Ram Dass Ashram that my older sister lived in one college summer. When everyone left the Ashram in the Fall she gave her to us. The cat was raised as a vegetarian, having only been fed brewer’s yeast. She was very skinny and was afraid of us at first. We started feeding her meat, and she transformed into a beast! Started going out hunting birds. She growled to warn us away when we put anything with meat into her dish.

She would run and jump into my arms and roll over onto her back to let me pet her, which seemed a very dog-like thing to me for a cat. I loved her so much