Forums → The Tavern → Close calls with dangerous animals and natural hazards. By SportShark

This thread is going to be about personal experiences with the above mentioned.
Being an avid outdoorsguy, I have had my fair share of encounters of the physically dangerous sort. All of the things that I talk about here are real and unexaggerated. As of this date I have...

1. Been attacked twice by domestic dogs. My first was about five years ago when a wild pitbull that surprised me when I was walking near a small abandoned chicken farm. I managed to scramble up a stone fence pillar post and throw loose stones at it until it went away.
My second encounter happened about four months ago when I was at a friend's house. He tried to introduce me to his big German shepherd so it could get used to me as part of his family, but things went wrong. He didn't know how to control is dog, I made the mistake of staring the dog in the eyes to long, then I listened to the bad advice of my pal and attempt to pet it on the head. Bad idea. Luckily my long sleeve shirt got the worst of it and my pal was able yank the dog off by its collar.

2. Have had a close proximity encounter with a bear in while backpacking in the Sierra Nevada. I was attempting to clean off in a freezing cold stream and the rushing stream made it impossible to hear anything approaching. Luckily, the bear was only interested in passing through. That gave me a mother load of an adrenaline rush when I looked up and saw that dude strolling past less than 15 feet away!

3. Almost stepped on a rattlesnake, three times. They were all baby ones that were curled into a little ball and were resting on my back porch when I used to live in the desert. Small ones like that are easy to overlook but the are just as deadly as the big ones.

4. Brushed by a shark while wading in an estuary. Luckily it was only about two feet long. It was still pretty scary for a minute there though.

And I'm not even going to list all of the instances where I have picked something up in the yard and a venomous spider or scorpion was crawling on it.