On April 25, 2004 a fifteen year old boy at a camp for troubled teens in Alaska punched out a four hundred pound bear and won. Apparently, trapped in his tent by the bear, the young man started throwing hooks and jabs. Although he was injured in the brawl, our champion made it past the bear into a tree where he sounded his emergency horn, scaring the bear and alerting the sleeping camp councilors. The bear was later shot, making the boy the clear winner.
Said Steve Prysunka, a councilor at the camp, "I think he is the biggest, baddest thing in the woods. He punched the bear."
Says the Gore Monger, "Forget Shaft. He's one Mean Mother******!"
Usually, bear attacks don't go so well. At the end of most attacks, the bear settles for a snack and the human gets to find out if there is a God.
Being eaten by animals is generally seen as a bad thing. Getting eaten by sharks in any of the 73,942 shark attack movies is almost always considered bad. There are exceptions to the, 'getting eaten is bad' rule of course. In "Jurassic Park," for example, Genaro, the attorney, gets eaten by the T-Rex. I cheered. As much as I enjoy eating attorneys, there are plenty to go around and I was glad to see old Rex doing his part to make the world a better place.
It begs the question, how do the animals that prey on humans do it? How can I work it into a story? Let's find out.
Most predatory attacks on humans come in one of four forms, neck bites, maulings, team attacks and twist attacks.
Since we're already talking about bears, let's do maulings first. A mauling is a generalized, "pound your prey into pulp" attack. Most animals do not favor this type of attack for just the reason cited above, the prey may strike back. Even a docile animal like a deer can deliver one hell of a kick if provoked and most predator's attack strategies try to make a clean kill without putting themselves at risk. Occasionally though, a large animal or an animal that is just having fun, like a hundred and twenty pound dog that's been locked in an apartment, will maul a victim to death. These attacks are disorganized and may involve claws and bites distributed all over the body. The victim in one of these attacks may live long enough to be aware of being eaten after the fight has been taken out of them. What fun.
Neck bites are really the most common form of predation on humans. Big cats and dogs are both capable of neck bites. While the attack may begin with claws to bring the target down, the predator in a neck bite attack will move quickly to clamp off the jugulars and crush the windpipe. Funny thing, when humans stop getting blood to their brains, they stop fighting in one heck of a jiffy.
It's is also interesting to note that neck biters tend to be the most efficient eaters as well. Most large predators will open up the guts of a victim and eat the liver first. In fact, they will generally eat all of the entrails before moving on to the muscle. Human victims of mountain lions are sometimes found hanging in trees, their guts gone and the rest being saved for a later meal.
Team attacks are only occasionally launched with the intent of eating a human. We're just too big. Dire wolves once hunted humans in packs and the wolf species still alive would be capable of such a feat but it rarely happens. Piranha still gang tackle a human ever once in a while. Their attack is disorganized and an individual bite only gets and "owie" rating on the Gore Monger's scale of human suffering, but stuck in the middle of a stream with several hundred of the little buggers fighting for a piece of you, it doesn't take long for you to be reduced to nothing but a red/brown smear on the water.
The final major, and my favorite, type of attack on humans is the twist attack. Many animals, like dogs, will shake prey once they've grabbed it both to tear it apart and to "whup up" on it if it is still alive. A few animals, sharks and crocodiles mainly, have taken this attack to and art form. It works this way; you make a sudden lung at your target, grabbing as big a mouthful as you can, then you throw your body over and over in a evil, macarena kind of thing. Once the prey is beaten into submission, you drag it underwater or off to your lair to munch on at your leisure. Human bodies just can't take it; arms flail, legs rip off, people make that funny "Whoop whoop" sound that they make when flung about in the air.
There are other attacks on humans, skunks, porcupines, lawyers, but these are not generally not intended to kill. The only other animal that typically preys on humans are other humans. If they run out of ways to be horrible to each other, why I'll be out of a job...Naw, that'll never happen.
Well, if you haven't got the cahones to punch out a bear, you better get out there and write.
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