The Darwin Awards 4: Intelligent Design (14 page)

The elephants were trampling Christian’s maize field, which he had planted on an elephant trail of long standing. He had to find a way to fight back! Fortunately, there was an old minefield nearby, on the Zimbabwe-Mozambique border. Christian figured a few land mines planted around his field would soon teach the elephants a lesson they would never forget.

Christian may have gotten the idea of using the mines from a couple of incidents that had recently transpired. A local resident had been injured after picking up a land mine while herding cattle the week before. A week before that, another Rushinga man had lost part of his leg after stepping on a land mine. The other villagers saw the writing on the wall, and avoided the mines.

But Christian realized they were just what he needed. Clearly, these mines could cause great damage to an elephant! He dug up five that had been exposed by recent heavy rains. And as he carried them home, the unstable mines detonated, killing Christian instantly.

The total number of elephants injured? Zero.

Reference:
Zimbabwe Herald

During his snake-handling performance, Boonreung the “Snake Man” was bitten on the right elbow by a deadly mamba. While a lesser mortal might have rushed to a doctor for a dose of antivenin, the daring thirty-four-year-old had his own treatment method: He downed a shot of whiskey and some herbal medicine. But alcohol and herbs are not generally recognized as effective against snakebites. It was on with the show—until paralysis gradually took hold, and he collapsed.

At this point, he was unable to speak, and thus raised no objections as bystanders took him to Praibung Hospital. But it was too late. The poison had spread throughout his body, and he died the same day. Ironically, Boonreung is immortalized in the
Guinness Book of World Records
for having spent seven days in a roomful of venomous snakes in 1998.

Reference: AP Asia

 

The mamba’s bite was described by Jack Seale, owner of a snake and animal park near Johannesburg, as “a pure neurotoxin—it gives you a buzz.” The victim becomes lightheaded, tingly, and warm. “It’s a lovely feeling,” says Seale. A single bite can deliver four hundred milligrams of paralyzing venom; a mere ten milligrams can be fatal to a human. When Seale was bitten, his treatment consisted of injections of antivenin, cortisone, and adrenalin, which helped him survive long enough to be hooked up to a heart-lung machine. After a week of dialysis and blood transfusions, he could finally wiggle a single finger. (“Black Mamba!”
International Wildlife
, Nov/Dec 1996.)

 

 

It’s no secret that elephants are big. Elephants eat hundreds of pounds of food a day just to maintain their weight. Indian elephants are nine feet tall at the shoulder. They’re so powerful that in Southeast Asia, males are used to haul massive tree trunks with their three-foot tusks, work performed by heavy equipment in other countries.

It’s also no secret that teasing an animal makes it mad. Teasing an animal that can carry a tree with its tusks may not be a good idea. Yet that was the very idea that formed in Prawat’s head when he saw a herd of five performing elephants chained to trees outside a Buddhist temple.

While the owner waited inside for an entertainment permit, Prawat, a fifty-year-old rubber-tapper, offered sugar cane to one of the ever-hungry elephants…then pulled it away. Then he did it again. And again. And again.

The game was great fun for Prawat, but the elephant quickly tired of it. The last time Prawat withdrew the treat, the elephant swung his massive tusks and gored him through the stomach. Prawat died on the way to the hospital. The elephant got his treat.

Reference:
The Star
(Kuala Lumpur)

Late one March evening, Bruce awoke at the foot of a utility pole in the woods, his dog asleep by his side and a crispy, dead raccoon nearby. Bruce was alarmed to discover “severe burns on his forearms, hands, and genitals, necessitating their amputation.”

What happened? The details came out in court, when Bruce sued the utility company for removing him from the gene pool.

He had been out coon hunting when his dog caught the scent and chased a raccoon up a power pole. The raccoon perched on a glass insulator. Bruce was prepared for just such an event. He strapped his trusty steel pole climbers to his boots, and made his way up the pole….

The court found Bruce contributory negligent, stating succinctly, “It [is] clear that, in climbing the utility pole, slapping and squalling at the raccoon, thereby agitating it when it was perilously close to charged wires, Bruce should have appreciated the hazard that ultimately befell him.”

Reference: 1986 Ind. App. LEXIS 3134

Radu, sixty-seven, lived in a formerly peaceful village near Galati. But lately Radu couldn’t get any sleep, all because of a single noisy chicken. Night after night he dreamed of wringing its neck, or even better, chopping its head off and eating it. One night, he finally had enough. He roused himself from bed and headed out to the yard in his underwear, determined to bring silence to his home.

The sleep-deprived villager grabbed that noisy chicken by the neck and chopped its head right off. Only then did he realize that he had confused his own penis for the chicken’s neck. While Radu stood stunned by his folly, his dog rushed over and gobbled up the treat.

He was rushed to the hospital, bleeding heavily. Doctors sewed up the wound and pronounced him out of danger. He is also in no danger of reproducing.

Reference: Reuters

An unidentified sixty-year-old Escobedo man was still thirsty after drinking what most would consider “too much alcohol.” He stumbled toward a nearby beehive, hoping to follow the beer with a bit of honey.

He thought the bees would surely share. Instead, they obeyed a Darwinian signal bred into them for millennia. More than a thousand noble fighters gave their all, sacrificed their stingers and their lives to protect the hive. The man, quite reasonably, responded with terminal anaphylactic shock.

A hospital spokesman disputed the theory that bees had killed him, attributing his demise to “the stupid things drunken people do,” and pointing out that he was otherwise healthy and would have enjoyed a long life. “The combination was lethal.”

Reference: ananova.com

“Bees don’t kill people, people kill bees.”

Ed, sixty-three, had trouble with termites at home. He had heard that natural gas was dangerous, and figured it would be a good, low-cost way to fumigate his house. So he shut the doors and windows, turned on the gas, and spent the night in a nearby camper trailer with his wife. The next morning he stepped out of the trailer, took a breath of the crisp, cool air, and strode over to his house.

When he opened the door, the slight spark from the latch ignited the cloud of natural gas that had accumulated in his home. The force of the explosion blew him off the porch and into a nearby creek, knocked out the town’s telephones and electricity, and blew the doors off a church. It rattled windows and nerves six miles away.

Ed was evacuated by helicopter to the burn unit at Cabell Huntington Hospital. His house was uninsured. It is presumed that the fumigation was effective.

Reference: West Virginia Metro News

Bruce, eighteen, wanted a unique gift for his girlfriend, who worked as a babysitter for a neighbor’s children. The neighbor thought that a Quaker parrot would be a perfect present. The beautiful green birds with gray bellies grow a foot long, counting their tails, and are worth more than $100. That was expensive, but the neighbor figured they could get a baby parrot for free…if they caught it.

Nothing stirs a man’s blood like the thrill of the hunt. Armed with a long metal pole, Bruce set out with the neighbor and his fifteen-year-old son to reconnoiter the nesting spot of the elusive Quaker parrot. The intrepid trio may have overlooked the fact that they were trespassing on private property, and that the property was owned by Florida Power. But it is unlikely that they failed to notice that the nests in question were inside a six-foot fence topped with three rows of barbed wire, surrounding an electric substation. This 230,000-volt transformer was peppered with signs saying,
DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE
and
NO TRESPASSING
.

The hunters overcame those obstacles and entered the parrot sanctuary, where about sixty colorful birds fluttered around their large, multistory stick nests. Fortunately one of the nests was situated on a transformer low enough to interest a hunter with a seven-foot metal pole. Bruce poked at the nest hoping to dislodge a hatchling, and fifteen thousand volts of electricity found their way down the pole, through his body, and into the ground.

Bruce suffered second-and third-degree burns over 50 percent of his body. The neighbor suffered minor burns between his ankles and knees. His son was not injured.

“That’s just a little hobby they have,” said the neighbor’s wife. “They like to go looking for those little baby Quaker parrots. I’m not saying [they were] right, but this was an accident.” And all this came from an innocent question about a birthday present at a Saturday hamburger cookout!

Reference:
St. Petersburg Times