Biological and chemical weapons have gone out of use due to the inability to control them and the inhuman effects they have on their targets. But as Machiavelli wrote, “When it is absolutely a question of the safety of one’s country, there must be no consideration of just or unjust, of merciful or cruel, of praiseworthy or disgraceful; instead, setting aside every scruple, one must follow to the utmost any plan that will save her life and keep her liberty.”

SEE ALSO: 10 Social And Biological Experiments With Freaky Results

10Siege Of Kirrha
590 BC

During the First Sacred War (Cirraean War) between the Amphictyonic League of Delphi and the city of Kirrha in Greece, chemical weaponry was employed to devastating effect. The war broke out as a result of Kirrha’s constant assault on the pilgrims passing through their lands to Delphi. The Amphictyonic League began their assault of the city by first poisoning its water supply with the toxic plant hellebore.

The plant’s high toxicity can cause vertigo, swelling of the tongue and throat, a feeling of suffocation, severe gastrointestinal problems, and cardiac arrest resulting in death. The plant did its job well, and the majority of the city was struck with severe bouts of diarrhea. The besiegers were able to walk into the city without facing any resistance.

9Dura-Europos
256 BC

When the Roman Army is at the gates, a defender will use just about any method or means to keep them at bay. Sasanian soldiers at Dura-Europos in modern Syria used bitumen ignited with sulfur within a tunnel the Romans were using to attempt entry into the city. The gas was so effective, it killed 19 Roman soldiers in under two minutes. The city was soon abandoned following the siege and remained uninhabited to this day, making it an important archaeological site due to the preservation of buildings and artifacts.

Due to the site’s preservation, archaeologists found chemical residue of sulfur crystals as well as the remains of the Roman soldiers plus one Sasanian, likely the individual who deployed the sulfur-bitumen concoction.

8Third Mithridatic War
73–63 BC

Mithridates (“the Poisoner King”) poisoned his mother and took various poisons himself to acquire an immunity over time. During his ongoing conflict with Rome, he often employed the use of poisoned arrows to thwart his enemies. During the third Mithridatic War, he used special arrows dipped in snake venom that would break off when they struck, leaving the metal tip coated with venom in the wound. The toxin would be fatal but would take days of agony to kill a man.

While retreating into modern Georgia, Mithridates left poisoned honey for the Romans to find. When consumed, the men would hallucinate and could even die from the consumption. There were not many casualties resulting from the honey, but such a large number of soldiers were high and hallucinating from the poison that they were useless for nearly a week.

7Siege Of Hatra
198

When Septimus Severus of the Imperial Roman legion attacked Hatra in 198, his soldiers scaled the walls to a very innovative weapon: terracotta pots filled with deadly scorpions. The men scaling the walls had the pots break open on and around them, releasing the scorpions as well as other stinging insects such as wasps and bees.

Some of the men died from the stings, while others became ill and perished due to the combination of the hot sun and the bites and stings. Scorpion bombs proved incredibly effective, and Septimus retreated, what remained of his army defeated.

6Battle Of Tortona
1155

The Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I, known as Barbarossa, assaulted Tortona during his Italian Campaign. Barbarossa personally undertook the attack of the city so that he could instigate their Milanese allies following their submission to his dominance of the peninsula.

He poisoned wells, bringing about numerous problems for the inhabitants of the city, the worst of which was a famine that crippled the population. This coincided with an ongoing drought, which made the unpotable well water an even greater problem. Barbarossa allowed the citizens to leave Tortona, and then he burned it to the ground. Modern residents of the city reenact the siege during a yearly celebration of the history of the town, which draws tourists from all over to enjoy the festivities.

5Battle Of Sandwich
1217

To repel an invading French fleet, the English navy under the command of Baron William D’Albiney used quicklime (calcium oxide), which he stocked aboard his vessels. He purposefully moved his ships upwind of the French and then let loose with the noxious compound into the wind so that the French were almost immediately blinded by the large cloud encompassing their ships.

Unable to defend themselves, they became an easy target for the English navy. The English sailors quickly stormed the French ships and slaughtered all but the knights due to the ransom they could receive. D’Albiney had long maintained a stock of calcium oxide on his vessels for just such an attack, but the Battle of Sandwich may have been the first time he was able to deploy it.

4Siege Of Kaffa
1346

During the siege of Kaffa in 1346, the invading Tatar army (part of the Mongolian Army of Genghis Khan) suffered an outbreak of the Bubonic plague. Never wanting to let an opportunity to devastate their enemy pass them by, the Tatars flung the corpses of their fallen plague-stricken brethren over the city walls to purposely infect their enemy. The plan worked, and the inhabitants of Kaffa were forced to surrender their city to the Mongol invaders.

It is believed that some of the survivors of the initial attack left Kaffa for Constantinople and other ports in the Mediterranean, which contributed to the pandemic known as the Black Death.

3Naples, Italy
1495

Spanish soldiers engaged in fighting throughout southern Italy used a method of biological warfare against their enemies that worked somewhat well. They added the blood of people afflicted with leprosy to bottles of wine they sold to the Italians. This was particularly dastardly due to the common perception that leprosy was a curse and punishment from God due to the disfiguring effects of the disease.

This method of biological warfare played the long game due to the manner in which leprosy spreads. The infection is long-term and can remain asymptomatic in a person’s body for between five and 20 years. This was not a very effective method of debilitating enemy soldiers and was likely done more for the stigma associated with leprosy than anything else.

2Siege Of Groningen
1672

During the Franco-Dutch War, Christoph Bernhard van Galen, the Bishop of Munster, used belladonna alkaloids contained within various forms of explosives and incendiary devices against his enemy. Atropa belladonna is more commonly known as deadly nightshade and is extremely toxic. Ingesting the alkaloids from the berries and leaves can cause severe delirium and hallucinations.

Van Galen’s use of deadly nightshade in warfare led to the first international agreement between nations, called the Strasbourg Agreement, to ban the use of “perfidious and odius” toxic devices. The Strasbourg Agreement came into being primarily due to the use of poisoned bullets employed by van Galen three years prior. The Strasbourg Agreement would remain the only such document until the 1925 Geneva Protocol, which included the banning of biological weapons.

1Siege Of Fort Pitt
1763

An outbreak of smallpox in the Ohio Valley was the result of an attack on the local natives in 1763 by the British Colonists besieged within Fort Pitt. Native American emissaries to the Fort received gifts, which came out of a smallpox infirmary with the hopes of spreading the disease to their populations. The emissaries pleaded with the colonists to vacate the fort due to overwhelming odds against them, but their attempts met with refusal and ultimately their deaths.

General Amherst said on July 8, “Could it not be contrived to Send the Small Pox among those Disaffected Tribes of Indians? We must, on this occasion, Use Every Stratagem in our power to Reduce them.” The British plan was very successful in deterring Native aggression due to the overwhelming infection spreading through their communities as a result of the attack.

The spread of infection didn’t stop at Fort Pitt. The Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw, and Choctaw tribes carried the disease throughout the southeast. Thousands were infected as a result of the siege at Fort Pitt.

+Further Reading

If this list hasn’t depressed and horrified you enough, check out these fascinating articles from the archives:

10 Biochemical Attacks That Were Stopped Just In Time
10 Dark Facts About The Worst Chemical Terror Attack In History
10 Poisons And Their Horrifying Effects
Top 10 Obsolete Weapons That Were Shockingly Deadly

Often swept under the rug and given nonthreatening names such as “collateral damage,” the deaths of civilians at the hands of military forces can sometimes surpass even the deaths of fighting men. Given humanity’s long history of warfare, it’s no surprise there is an equally long list of military attacks on civilians. Here are ten of the worst examples.

10 Shimabara Rebellion

Christianity had begun to flourish in Japan during the 17th century, as the country had been slowly opening up more and more to foreigners (mainly Europeans) since 1543. However, the influence of nanbans (Japanese for “southern barbarians,” a term loosely applied to Europeans) began to worry the ruling shogunate, and the age of sakoku (“closed country”) began to take shape. Christianity was seen as one of those influences. There were many Christian peasants, and their dissatisfaction was the reason for the rebellion which occurred in the Shimabara Peninsula in 1637.

Like many before them, the local officials of the area were taxing the peasants heavily, utilizing their powers to abuse the civilians in any number of ways. The spark that lit the fire was the murder of the daimyo’s henchman, who was killed because he was torturing a local farmer’s daughter.^[1] (A daimyo was similar to a feudal lord.) Fighting broke out, and the peasants quickly assembled into a massive group. They were aided by former samurai, many of whom had converted to Christianity, who became leaders of the rebellion.

Unable to defeat the rebels with local forces, the shogun set 120,000 men to kill the civilians. Though they held out for a while, the rebels were eventually killed to the last person, women and children included. Estimates range from 20,000 to 37,000 deaths. As a result, Christianity, as well as other foreign influences, were increasingly forced out of Japan.

9 Bombing Of Dresden

Often seen, perhaps erroneously, as an act of revenge for the similar bombing of their own cities suffered at the hands of the Luftwaffe, Britain’s bombing of the German city of Dresden in February 1945 has been covered in controversy ever since. One of the reasons for this controversy is that the city was not of military or economic importance.^[2] Rather, the bombing was an attack on a culturally important city: the “Florence of the Elbe.”

The Nazis had been bombing British cities for a while by 1945, and in the eyes of some, the bombing of German cities was just their chickens coming home to roost. So, from February 13 to 15, 1945, British planes (with a few Americans) flew over the city of Dresden, devastating the area. Like many attacks during World War II, the death tolls are disputed, with ranges as low as 35,000 and as high as 135,000. However, what isn’t in dispute is the complete destruction of nearly every building in the city. Only a handful of the historic buildings in the city were ever rebuilt.

8 Guangzhou Massacre

Thanks to a number of natural disasters which resulted in widespread famine, Huang Chao led an agrarian rebellion throughout China, eventually culminating with his ascension to the throne. The Tang dynasty attempted, unsuccessfully, to defeat Huang’s forces, who managed to sack a number of provincial capitals. Huang then turned his sight toward Guangzhou, which had suffered at the hands of a rebellious army more than a century earlier. (Thousands of foreign-born merchants were killed.)

So, from 878 to 879, Huang’s men attacked the city, specifically targeting Muslims, Jews, and Christians, initiating a xenophobic pogrom, an act with which humanity is all too familiar. An otherwise nondescript Arab traveler named Abu Zaid Hassan wrote about the attack, claiming that as many as 120,000 people were massacred.^[3] As for Huang, his army was eventually defeated, and he died at the hands of his nephew. His entire reign lasted only four years.

7 Manila Massacre

Colloquially known as the “Pearl of the Orient,” Manila was a magnificent city, the capital of the Philippines, and it would suffer more than any Allied city outside of Warsaw. First occupied by Japan in 1942, the Pacific island chain endured years of military abuse, with hundreds of thousands of Filipinos perishing during the intervening years. Finally, in 1945, US forces arrived, with General MacArthur fulfilling the promise he gave three years prior to return to drive the Japanese away and retake the country.

However, the Japanese military refused to give up easily, and in a continuance of their policy at the time, they began to speed up their killing of civilians. During the Battle of Manila, which lasted about a month, around 70,000 Filipinos were raped and/or massacred by the Japanese army.^[4] A further 30,000 died in the crossfire between Japan and the US. In addition to the civilian casualties, vast portions of the city were destroyed in the fighting, some down to the very last building.

6 Firebombing Of Tokyo

While deserving of much of their attention, the nuclear weapons dropped on Japan at the end of World War II weren’t the only causes of devastating numbers of civilian deaths suffered there: Another example is the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945. Later known by the name “the Night of the Black Snow,” Operation Meetinghouse took place from March 9 to March 10, with US bombers dropping 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs on the city.

In all, 41 square kilometers (16 mi²) were burned, with as many as 130,000 deaths due to the resulting inferno.^[5] The smell of burning human flesh was so severe that the pilots in the air had to don oxygen masks to keep from vomiting. When asked about it later, Curtis LeMay, the major general in charge, said, “Killing Japanese didn’t bother me very much at that time. It was getting the war over that bothered me.” The firebombing of Tokyo is often cited as one of the most, if not the most, destructive acts of war in the history of mankind.

5 Siege Of Changchun

May 23, 1948. The People’s Liberation Army began surrounding the city of Changchun, one of the largest in Northeastern China, defended by Nationalist forces. Not wishing to attempt to force their way into the city, the Communists decided to starve the population out, hoping to push the defenders to surrender bloodlessly. The civilian population of around 500,000 was caught unprepared, and they quickly ran out of food.

It later became clear there was an ulterior motive to the siege: The Communists were purposely starving the citizens, whom they saw as the enemy. Stories of women sold to awaiting husbands-to-be for mere scraps of food were all too common. When the siege finally ended in October, a minimum of 160,000 civilians had starved to death. Those who had survived had only managed to live by eating virtually every edible thing in the city, down to the bark on the trees and the grass in the fields. A Communist soldier later remarked, “We’re supposed to fighting for the poor, but of all these dead here, how many are rich? [ . . . ] Aren’t they all poor people?”^[6]

4 Siege Of Jerusalem

Though Jerusalem has seen a number of sieges take place outside its walls, perhaps none was bloodier than the climactic battle of the First Crusade. Initiated in 1095 by Pope Urban II’s decrying of the persecution suffered by Christians in the Holy Land, tens of thousands of Western Europeans streamed into the Middle East like a deluge, massacring anyone who was in their way, soldier or civilian.^[7]

Facing little resistance, the wave of crusaders finally broke against the walls of Jerusalem on June 7, 1099. Finding it to be incredibly well-protected, the Christian forces began constructing three massive siege engines with which to defeat the defenses. After about a month, the crusaders finally broke into the city, and the slaughter began. A contemporary account of the fighting told a horrifying tale of senseless barbarism, of deaths so numerous that, “The blood was running up to ankles of the mounted Frankish knights.” Whether or not that was hyperbole, tens of thousands of the civilian inhabitants were murdered, even women and children.

3 The Harrying Of The North

“Harry” is defined as “to ravage, as in war; devastate.” The Harrying of the North, undertaken by William the Conqueror against Northern England, lived up to that definition in every conceivable way. The old Viking lineage which persisted in the North refused to bow to William, with numerous rebellions popping up until the Norman ruler could only come to one conclusion: He would destroy the entire place, starving out the enemy.^[8] That the civilians would also suffer was of no consequence.

So, in the winter of 1069, William’s men marched north, destroying everything in their way, down to the last blade of grass. Though the Harrying directly killed a large number of civilians, many more perished as a result of the enormous famine which resulted from the destruction of the land, livestock, and food stores. The campaign was so horrific that Orderic Vitalis, a monk who otherwise wrote glowingly of William, said the following: “I can say nothing good about this brutal slaughter. God will punish him.” Though the death tolls are often debated, contemporary reports say as many as 100,000 people died.

2 Massacre Of Novgorod

In late 1569, the grand prince of Moscow had begun to reach the peak of his paranoia, believing that the people of Novgorod were about to turn over their city to Poland. Better known as Ivan IV, or Ivan the Terrible, he decided that the citizens of Novgorod would need to be punished. So, along with his 1,500-man personal guard, the tsar marched on the city, ravaging smaller towns and villages along the way, warming up for what was to be the horrifying main event.

Arriving just after the start of the new year, Ivan IV began the horror with the priests and monks of Novgorod, having them beaten to death with staffs.^[9] He then moved on to the populace, setting up a special court in the city in which to extract “confessions” through torture. Often, the victims were then thrown into the Volkhov River to drown or freeze to death. Man, woman, and child alike met the same fate, and their blood ran so much that the snow around the city was painted red. When it was all over about five weeks later, at least 60,000 citizens were dead, and it took six weeks to clear their bodies.

1 Rotterdam Blitz

Expecting to remain neutral as they had during World War I, the people of Rotterdam in the Netherlands never expected the Nazis to come knocking. But knock they did. On May 10, 1940, the Germans attacked. They were ultimately repelled and locked into a stalemate with their Dutch adversaries. Unwilling to risk too many lives or time, Nazi general Rudolf Schmidt issued an ultimatum: Surrender or face the might of the Luftwaffe. The Dutch refused.

A few days later, May 14 to be exact, the bombing began.^[10] Between 80 and 90 German planes indiscriminately dropped their ordinance all over the city. Owing to the fact that they had virtually no antiaircraft weapons in the city, not to mention inferior air power, all the Dutch could do was watch as their city was leveled. In the end, nearly 1,000 people died, and most of the historic buildings within the city center were destroyed.

Though the deaths directly attributed to the Rotterdam Blitz are low, the argument could be made that it, along with the other Nazi bombing raids, unleashed the extensive destruction perpetrated by the Allies. As the British air marshal Arthur Travers Harris said, “The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.”

When we hear about biting attacks, most of us think of Austin Harrouff’s face munching or Mike Tyson tasting Evander Holyfield’s ear. However, biting attacks happen with alarming frequency.

Although children bite, we supposedly outgrow this atavistic behavior. Yet, if we routinely resort to mauling with the mouth, a question emerges: How savage is humanity?

10 Brutal Attacks On Prisoners By Prison Guards

10 Mafioso Muncher

In prison, weapons can be improvised from anything—even mouths. On September 9, 2020, Italian daily Il Messaggero reported that a Sicilian Mafia boss bit off and swallowed the pinkie finger on the right hand of a prison guard.

Giuseppe Fanara, 60, attacked the guard during a cell inspection at Rome’s Rebibbia Prison. According to the report, “The finger disappeared, leading a Rome prosecutor to conclude it had been eaten.”^[1]

Nine years into a life sentence, Fanara languished in solitary confinement due to Italy’s 41-bis penal code. The law targeting Mafia bosses not only imposes harsh sentences but also isolation to prevent top gangsters from running criminal enterprises behind bars.

Authorities transferred the Sicilian don to Sardinia’s Sassari high-security prison. He faces new charges of aggravated assault and resisting arrest. Fanara’s mouth wasn’t the only weapon. The prisoner allegedly brandished a broomstick at the other six guards while shouting, “I’ll slit your throats like pigs.”

9 I Don’t Eat Flesh, I Just Drink Blood

In April 2019, Joel Davila bit a chunk out of a gas station attendant’s face in Taunton, Massachusetts. The 19-year-old perpetrator allegedly savaged the Sunoco clerk after the victim attempted to stop Davila from stealing.

While licking blood from his fingers, Davila reportedly uttered, “I don’t eat flesh, I just drink blood.” Witness Michael Keegan secured Davila at the scene until police arrived. He noted that the 19-year-old “hissed at me like a feral cat” and finger-painted with the clerk’s blood.^[2]

Once police arrived, they attempted to locate the severed face flesh. Davila allegedly contradicted his earlier statement: “I think I ate it. You can cut my stomach open to check.”

A judge ordered Davila held without bail at Bridgewater State Hospital for a mental health evaluation. Family members said, “Joel is not stable right now.” In November 2018, Davila was arrested for vandalizing and urinating on the floor of a church.

8 Missing Manhood

In August 2019, a woman escaped her kidnapper by biting off his penis. The unnamed victim fled captivity and knocked on various residents’ doors before eventually making it to a Waffle House in Greenville, South Carolina. Later, authorities discovered registered sex offender Dennis Slaton, 61, covered in blood at his house.

“It was pretty bad, pretty tragic, what happened to me,” said Slaton, who has previous convictions for sodomy and attempted rape. Although the police report did not note how the penis had been severed, Slaton told 7News that his abductee had bitten it off.^[3]

On August 8, 2019, Slaton had picked up the victim at a gas station. Then he pulled a knife on her and forced her into his house. There, he sexually assaulted her and threatened her life. The victim used Slaton’s knife to stab him in the buttocks. Slaton’s address is listed as Jesus Saves Ministries.

7 Rough Roleplay

In September 2019, Oakland County deputies discovered two partially nude women covered in blood in a Rochester Hills, Michigan, residence. They found Allison Thompson Weaver, 44, hovering over a 48-year-old woman with a partially detached ear.

According to the unnamed victim, she had invited Weaver over for drinks. After refusing Weaver’s sexual advances, the victim went to bed, only to awaken to Weaver stripping the victim and strangling her while biting her face.^[4]

During preliminary examinations, Deputy Shawn Hopkins reported, “Weaver told me that they were having consensual sex and that [the victim] was a vampire and that Ms. Weaver was the wolf.” Hopkins also noted that “the outer edge of her left ear appeared to be missing” and that a chunk of cheek flesh “was completely gone . . . possibly bitten off.”

The victim insisted that the role-playing was not consensual. However, she said, “[We kissed] once when our daughters were young.”

6 Uber Attack

Think your job bites? On August 18, 2019, Uber driver Yasser Hadi faced a random attack in midtown Atlanta after dropping off a passenger. Unprovoked, Tasheena Denise Campbell, 26, approached from nowhere and pounced on his Prius.

After destroying Hadi’s windshield wipers and entering his car, she set her sights on him. Campbell lobbed some haymakers and then took a bite out of Hadi’s midsection. Several bystanders videotaped the event, but they failed to intervene until the damage was done.

Police eventually arrested Campbell for battery and criminal trespass. According to the report, she urinated on the station floor, repeatedly rammed her head against the wall, and required restraints.^[5]

“A dog does not bite like this. She’s still biting while I’m pulling for about 30 seconds,” explained Hadi. According to the Uber driver, Campbell not only took a bite out of his ribs but out of “my job, my health, and . . . pocket money.”

Top 10 Unusual Ways People Have Survived Bear Attacks

5 Psychotic Cellmate

On December 4, 2019, Miguel Lucas began lawsuit proceedings against the County of San Diego for an attack while he was in custody. Lucas, 26, claimed that inmate Reginald Harmon attacked him without reason and bit off a large portion of his cheek.

The filing claims that Harmon, 35, had attacked inmates on previous occasions and that even Harmon’s mother had warned authorities about her son’s need for a segregated cell.^[6]

According to Lucas’s attorney, Chris Morris, this incident is part of “a complete lack of direction in making mental health a priority in our jails.” Lucas claimed that the incident gave him PTSD and a large keloid scar due to insufficient treatment.

He also said that defendant Deputy Gustafson observed the 15-minute assault over security monitors but failed to do anything. The plaintiff alleged that Gustafson and other deputies took photos with the piece of cheek. Then they suggested that “[Lucas] could have put up a better fight.”

4 Moment Of Madness

Young women can be savage to one another, especially when exes are involved. On February 3, 2019, the Aura Nightclub dance floor in Dundee became a scene of horrors when 19-year-old college student Danielle Gaffar mauled Kyra Strachan.

The “impulsive” attack began over a former flame. Gaffar admitted to grabbing Strachan’s hair, pummeling her head into the ground, choking and eventually permanently disfiguring her with a savage bite to the cheek. Strachan, 18 at the time of the incident, was dancing when Gaffar attacked from behind. The bite required plastic surgery to secure Strachan’s flapping flesh.

The Scottish court imposed a 16-month sentence on Gaffar. The attack was “entirely out of character,” said defense solicitor Jim Laverty. For Gaffar, this “fleeting moment of madness” drew outrage, death threats, and lost job opportunities.

Despite Gaffar’s insistence that the “loss of self-control . . . will never, ever be repeated again,” Sheriff Thomas Hughes insisted that a custodial sentence was essential.^[7]

3 A Bite Out Of Discrimination

On April 1, 2020, a COVID-19 patient bit a nurse’s face in Guangzhou in southern China. It all started when Okonkwonwoye Chika Patrick, 47, tested positive for coronavirus. He refused medical tests and assaulted nurse Wang Hong when she attempted to stop him from escaping quarantine.

Patrick pushed the nurse to the ground and pummeled her before sinking his teeth into her face. According to police, the Nigerian passport holder was to be charged once he was released from treatment.

The same month, Time magazine published an article about discrimination facing Africans in Guangzhou following the COVID-19 outbreak. Sources noted that landlords monitored African residents’ doors with surveillance cameras, magnetic strips, and alarms as the government insisted that “all Africans must be isolated at home.”

According to another source, a woman and four Ugandan roommates were forcibly quarantined in a hotel, where they were charged $500 each. Additionally, videos have begun circulating of Africans being barred from Guangzhou supermarkets and restaurants, including McDonald’s.^[8]

2 Never Mind The Dog, Beware Of Owner

On January 3, 2019, Alma Cadwalader, 19, bit a jogger on Oakland’s Goldenrod Trail. Jogger Cyndi Stainner admitted she pepper-sprayed Cadwalader’s off-leash shepherd-husky mix, but only to prevent an attack.

Stainner insisted the dog owner hit her in the head, pushed her face into the dirt, and attempted to wrestle away the pepper spray. Then Cadwalader allegedly sank her teeth into Stainner’s arm for 10–15 seconds. “She was literally latched to my arm,” said Stainner.^[9]

Cadwalader’s attorney, Emily Dahm, admitted that her client sank her teeth into the jogger. But Dahm insisted the “bad bite” was in self-defense as Cadwalader attempted to stop Stainner from pepper-spraying the dog. Cadwalader had no previous criminal record. She faced charges of false imprisonment, battery with serious bodily injury, and robbery.

According to Stainner’s friend Sue Hernandez, it is inconceivable that Stainner—a nurse, caregiver, and animal lover—would have harmed a dog unless absolutely necessary.

1 ‘Hold My F—king Cigarette’

During Christmas celebrations in 2018, a prominent businessman brutalized a cricket coach at a Welsh pub. When doctors examined victim Jarrad Davies, 23, they wanted to know what kind of dog had attacked him.

It turned out that the animal was Anthony Wade Mears, 51, the Welsh-born head of Saudi-based Ma’aden Aluminium Company. Mears was home for the holidays. The incident at a Wetherspoons pub in Aberdare began as Davies accidentally bumped into Mears.

Witnesses alleged that Mears uttered “hold my f—king cigarette” before pouncing on Davies. During the attack, Mears bit Davies four times. The victim noted that one chomp to the midsection resembled a “second belly-button.”

Mears denied the allegations until he was confronted with CCTV footage of the event. After pleading guilty, Mears received a 21-month sentence, which was reduced to six months on appeal. Curiously, Mears’s father had been a detective inspector in Aberdare for more than 30 years.^[10]

Top 10 Animal Bites that will Completely Destroy You

About The Author: Abraham Rinquist is the executive director of the Helen Hartness Flanders Folklore Society. A certified ethnomusicologist, he is currently penning “Whoa Man: A Feminist Critique of the Vienna Boys’ Choir.”

In the evolutionary arms race between predators and prey a huge range of weapons and techniques have developed to give each side the edge it takes to survive. Many prey evolve ways to avoid the attention of their predators, but predators also find stealthy ways to capture their dinner. From camouflage, to play acting, to launching traps life finds ever new ways of fighting in the war of life.

Here are ten of the sneakiest predators to be found in nature.

10 Amazing Mummified Animals We Have Found

10 Assassin Bug vs Spider

Spiders are superbly adapted predators. They dominate their little worlds with their quick movements, venomous attacks, and subtle senses. Generally any little bug that blunders into a spider’s web is in for a bad time. For the Giraffe Asssassin Bug however they actively hunt down spider webs, and turn the tables on the web-spinner.

When the spindly assassin bug spots a spider in a web they head straight for it. A spider can detect vibrations from its web silks as small as a millionth of an inch. This gives it both time to grab prey and flee from any predator that may be coming. The assassin bug manages to cut its way towards the spider without alarming it.

It does this by grasping individual strands of silk and slicing them. It then releases them with the minimum amount of disruption to the web. Even as the assassin bug is climbing the web the spider remains unaware of its danger until it is stabbed by the assassin’s sharp needle mouth that will suck the spider dry.

9 Anglerfish

Anglerfish are notably ugly animals. This doesn’t much matter to them as they live in the darkest parts of the ocean. In the pitch black regions of the ocean there is not only no one to see them there are also relatively few prey for them to eat. If the anglerfish wants to eat it must attract animals towards them. It does this by working with bacteria to create a luminous lure.

The bacteria live inside the anglerfish and produce an eerie light via bioluminescence. The fish provides the bacteria with nutrients while the bacteria brings in the prey. When fish or squid see the glowing lure they head towards the anglerfish. As soon as they are within range of the fish’s long teeth it opens its large jaws and grabs whoever has strayed too close. When the large, distended stomach is full the anglerfish can hide its lure away and lurk in the dark to slowly digest its meal.

Only the female anglerfish has a lure. The males of the species can be hundreds of times smaller than the female but are equally sneaky. Using a large sensory organ they sniff out the females and race towards them. Once near the males bite the female and dissolve their own heads to merge with the female. The male gives up his independent life and remains bound to the female, occasionally pumping sperm into her.

8 Photuris firefly

Watching the bioluminescent dance of fireflies in a twilight wood is one of the most beautiful sights in nature. While their displays may spark romantic feelings in humans they do the same in other fireflies. The light of a firefly is a sign to others that it wants to mate. Or sometimes it is the false lure of sex that draws male fireflies to their doom.

The Photuris fireflies seem to have evolved bioluminescence independently of other fireflies and they use it to mimic female fireflies. When a male firefly sees the Photuris flash its lights it moves in to mate. Instead it has a store of vital chemicals sucked out of its head and is then eaten by the Photuris. Quite the bad ending to a date.

Fireflies produce chemicals that help them ward off predators, but the Photuris does not. If it wants protection it must consume them from their prey. The Lucibufagins that repel predators can then be recycled by the Photuris fireflies to also protect their eggs.

7 Livingstone’s Cichlids

Playing dead can be a great defence mechanism. Some animals will only eat live prey so to not die prey sometimes pretend to already be dead. For Livingstone’s Cichlids, Nimbochromis livingstonii, playing dead is not a defence but a subtle form of attack.

The small fish have a splotchy but eye-catching pattern on them. It looks a little as if their flesh is rotting. This comes in handy when they head to the bottom of a lake and lay perfectly still on their side. There is nothing more tempting in nature than a free meal and soon small fish will gather around the apparently dead fish. It is then that the cichlid strikes and swallows their prey whole before moving on to play dead again.

Found in Lake Malawi these fish are commonly known to local fishermen as ‘kalingono’ – the sleeper.

6 Bolas Spider

Some animals are not only sneaky predators they are also sneaky prey. For some species of Bolas spider they have evolved to look exactly like a pile of bird droppings. They spend the day waiting on top of a leaf and are mostly left alone by any animal that might prey on them – who wants to eat bird poop? It is at night that they spiders transform into cunning hunters.

During the night the spiders move to the underside of a leaf and spin out a thick and strong strand of silk. At the end of this strand is a sticky and heavy mass. Then the spider waits with this bolas hanging from its front legs. The spider is waiting for a moth to come too close. As soon as one comes within reach it lashes out with the bolas. Stuck on the strand the moth is reeled in and devoured by the spider.

It is not only the method of ‘fishing’ for moths that is sneaky. To lure in more moths Bolas spiders have evolved the ability to pump out pheromones that are attractive to the moths. The spiders can even select the correct pheromone for the moth species that are fluttering around it.

10 Animals That Can Detect What Humans Can’t

5 Net-casting spider

Spider webs are generally stationary objects. You might therefore scoff at animals that have been foolish enough to get caught in them. For the Net-casting Spider, also known as Ogre-faced spiders (Biologists can be cruel), they don’t give their prey a chance to escape. They bring the web to the prey.

Net-casting spiders spin a special web across their front arms while they hang from a branch. With their large forward facing eyes, hence the Ogre-face name, they watch out for small insects passing beneath. The web spun between their limbs is a specially prepared stretchy form of silk. As soon as they spot their prey the spiders stretch out their legs, pull open the net, and reach down to ensnare the insect beneath them in a fraction of a second.

The spiders will lurk for hours waiting for their prey. To make sure they have the best chance of capturing them they will set a target for their aim. This is often made of white splashes of their own faeces. As soon as the prey steps in the faeces the dirty stuff really hits the fan and the spider pounces.

4 Frogfish

Frogfish are pretty strange looking fish – because they often look like almost anything other than a fish. They are generally small and stocky with fins that are muscular and act like legs to allow them to walk across the seabed. They are also covered in appendages that help them to camouflage as everything from seaweed to coral. This mimicry helps them hide from predators but also lets them ambush their prey.

They often sit motionless in their environment waiting for prey to stumble across them. Then they open their mouths wide and pull in their food. Their mouths can expand over ten times larger than they normally are while resting which doesn’t give prey much room to escape.

As well as camouflage some frogfish use lures on their heads to tempt in unwary prey. Some have lures that resemble worms that they bob around to make them extra enticing. Others have lures shaped like shrimp or even small fish – complete with fake fins and eye spots.

3 Puff adder tongues

You would not think that a deadly venomous snake would have to put much effort into sneaking. Surely they just bite their prey and sit back to enjoy their meal. Puff adders however have evolved a more sedate method of hunting – they let their tongue do the work.

The puff adders are ambush hunters who will wait for food to run in front of them. It does this while most of its sinuous body is concealed and only its head and eyes are exposed. Then it launches forwards and bites them. If it wants prey to come to it however it can use its tongue in a technique called ‘lingual luring.’ With its tongue hanging out any unfortunate frog that comes by may be fooled into thinking there is an insect for it to snack on. When it gets close enough to investigate the frog suddenly finds itself the hunted and not the hunter.

If the puff adder is in the mood for a larger meal it can use it tail to lure them in by waving it rhythmically through the air so that it resembles a worm or large grub.

2 False Cleanerfish

Cleaner fish are some of the nicest creatures in the ocean. They perform a vital service for larger fish. When a large fish finds itself crawling with parasites a cleaner fish with swoop in and eat the damaging little creatures. The larger fish benefits because it is free of parasites and the cleaner fish gets a good meal so everyone benefits, except the parasites. But some animals can’t just let nice things happen. The False Cleanerfish takes advantage of everyone.

The False Cleanerfish has evolved to perfectly mimic the real Bluestreak Cleaner Wrasse in size, shape, and skin pattern. Because larger fish have learned that cleaner fish help them they let them near without eating them. This is when the False Cleanerfish swims in. Instead of ridding the larger fish of their parasites they nip in and bite off a chunk off the larger fish.

The False Cleanerfish then swims off with its stolen bit of flesh and the larger fish learns not to be so trusting in future.

1 Assassin Bug vs Ants

Social insects like ants and bees are masters of recognising who belongs in their nests and hives. Using smell alone they can identify other members of their collective. As soon as they smell something that does not belong they either attack it or cast it out. Usually this system is enough to protect them but the Assassin Bug called Acanthaspis petax has found a macabre but ingenious way past their defences.

This assassin bug forms what is called ‘corpse camouflage’ while it is a young nymph. Using a sticky secretion it gathers the dead bodies of ants and sticks them together into a mound it carries on its back. This lets it get close to its prey without them immediately noticing that it is a predator.

It may be that the scent of the dead ants masks the assassin’s own aroma. It may be that the huge pile of ants on its back forms unusual shapes that confuse the eye of other insects. However the camouflage works the assassin uses it both to protect itself from predators and to get close to its prey and suck them dry.

10 Animals With Cannibalistic Sex Habits

Many animals can be great companions to humans, but in some cases they can also be killers. Several people on this list knew the risks when they decided to spend time in wild places. Others were surprised by danger where they least expected, like on a sunny vacation or on their own balcony. A few of them were even experts who devoted their entire lives to animals. But all of them faced deadly consequences when these particular creatures turned violent.

Top 10 Unusual Ways People Have Survived Bear Attacks

10 2010 Egyptian Shark Attacks

Sharm El Sheikh is a seaside city in Egypt and a hub for the country’s tourism industry. But their friendly reputation was forever scarred in 2010, when there was a spree of five shark attacks. On December 1st, a shark attacked 48-year-old Olga Martynenko, severely injuring her spine and limbs. Onlookers dragged her to safety. Minutes later, 70-year-old Lyudmila Stolyarova lost her foot and arm. Witnesses were able to beat the shark away from her with rubber fins. Then 54-year-old Yevgeniy Trishkin was attacked and lost part of his leg. 46-year-old Viktor Koliy was the final victim of the rampage, also losing a foot. The four victims were all Russian and Ukrainian tourists.

The beaches were immediately closed and the government called in experts to investigate. A seven-and-a-half-foot whitetip shark and a eight-foot mako shark were caught and the beach was reopened on December 4th. But the next day, a 71-year-old German woman was attacked. Her arm was bitten off and she died soon after. Experts theorized that overfishing could have changed shark behavior in the area. Scuba diving companies were also accused of feeding sharks to attract them for tourists. It is also possible that bloody sheep carcasses could have drawn the sharks to shore when they were dumped off nearby boats during the holiday of Eid al-Adha.

9 Horatio Chapple Polar Bear Attack

In the summer of 2011, a group of students went on an adventure expedition with the British Schools Exploring Society. The plan was for eighty people to spend a month in the Svalbard islands, halfway between the coast of Norway and the North Pole. But less than two weeks into the trip, the team was camping for the night when they were attacked by a starving polar bear. 17-year-old Horatio Chapple was killed. One of his friends would later need surgery to remove the bear’s teeth from his scalp after he punched it in the nose. Another boy’s jaw was smashed. The bear was shot by an expedition leader who was also seriously injured. The wounded team members were flown to mainland Norway and the expedition was ended immediately.

Chappele was a graduate of the exclusive English boarding school Eton College, and he was an aspiring doctor who planned to work on a cure for diabetes. The expedition team was criticized for their planning of the trip. There was no watchman on the night of the attack, and the emergency gun did not fire for four attempts because the safety was left on. Explosives were set up around the camp to stop polar bears but they did not go off, possibly because they were improperly set up. Norwegian officials ruled in 2012 that the incident could have been stopped if the team had slept in cabins instead of tents, but the organization in charge of the trip was not prosecuted for the death.

8 Allen Campbell Elephant Attack

Allen Campbell was an experienced zookeeper who consulted on elephant rides across the country. He was described as a hard-worker by his colleagues, and his greatest dream was to train circus elephants. He made positive changes to the elephant program in Baton Rouge by insisting that the animals were fed everyday and their cages cleaned twice a day, but he was later fired from a different zoo after allegations that he had abused animals.

In August of 1994, Campbell was working at a circus show in Honolulu, Hawaii with an elephant named Tyke. Tyke was a female elephant from Mozambique that had previously been abused by her trainers. She had escaped twice in 1993 and gone on rampages, but had been re-captured both times. At this show in Hawaii, Tyke attacked groomer Dallas Beckwith in front of thousands of spectators, throwing him several times. Campbell rushed to help, but was knocked under her trunk and crushed to death. Tyke then ran out of the center and severely injured circus publicist Steve Hirano, who tried to hold the gates closed. After a half-hour chase through the streets, police officers shot Tyke eighty-six times and killed her. The case was complicated when 37-year-old Campbell was found to have alcohol and cocaine in his system during his autopsy. In the wake of this incident, the LA Times reported that elephant handling was the most dangerous job in the United States.

7 Richard Root Crocodile Attack

Dr. Richard Root was a college professor, chief of medicine at Harborview Medical Center, and a national infectious disease expert. He left his work temporarily to care for his sick wife and spiraled into depression when she passed away. But a few years later, he met his second wife and re-entered the medical field with fresh energy. Root and his new bride were invited on a two month medical program in Botswana run by the University of Pennsylvania. Many of the patients there were infected with HIV, and Root was reportedly overjoyed with his new job treating them.

The couple decided to go on a canoe tour of the Limpopo River in the Tuli Nature Reserve to observe local wildlife. They were each in individual canoes with two guides following them when a crocodile jumped up and pulled Root into the water. He never resurfaced. His wife and the guides witnessed the attack. Local experts told the medical program director that there had never been a crocodile attack in that river before, and that they had actually been worried about hippopotamuses. Root’s river guide was reportedly traumatized by the incident. The doctor helped to inspire many medical students, and had been voted Teacher of the Year of Yale Medical School in 1982.

6 Kali River Goonch Attacks

Goonch catfish are no ordinary river dwellers. They can grow to over six feet long and two-hundred pounds. Generally goonch feed on smaller fish, but in the Great Kali River they may have developed another diet. This river between India and Nepal is often used to dispose of human remains after cremation, and some believe this may have allowed these catfish to develop a taste for human flesh. In April of 1998, 17-year-old Dil Bahadur was dragged underwater in front of his girlfriend. Three months later, another boy was pulled into the river in front of his father. In 2007, an 18-year-old boy disappeared into the water. None of their bodies were ever found. During the last attack, witnesses saw an animal that they described as an “elongated pig”.

British biologist and fisherman Jeremy Wade investigated the cases for his television show River Monsters. He was initially skeptical that goonch catfish had been involved but after hearing that all the attacks occurred within five miles he became intrigued. Theories of whirlpools, crocodiles, and bull sharks were all disproven. Wade set up a funeral pyre as a trap, and caught a 161 pound goonch. He said of the fish, “If that got hold of you, there would be no getting away”. It was not proven whether the goonch that he caught was the one that committed the attacks, but the investigation did prove that human-sized fish were present in the river.

5 Tricia Wyman Wolf Attack

24-year-old Patricia Wyman was hired as a wolf caretaker and educator at the Haliburton Forest Wildlife Reserve in Ontario, Canada in 1996. Wyman was a wildlife biologist who had spent time at the reserve before, and began her job on April 14th. The reserve’s Wolf Center exhibit consisted of 15-acres of forest home to North American wolves that were born in captivity but not socialized with humans. Wyman had gone inside the forest once with her supervisor and once alone to feed the wolves.

On April 18th, she entered the enclosure alone and five adult wolves attacked her. Two other employees found her body later that day and called the authorities. Two police officers entered the enclosure and the wolves behaved aggressively, growling and circling them. Six officers were needed to remove Wyman’s body, which had multiple bite and tear wounds. Her clothes had also been removed by the animals. The five wolves involved in the attack were killed to be tested for rabies. Wyman was alone when she was attacked, so the exact circumstances of her death will never be known. But wolf expert Dr. Erich Klinghammer believed that Wyman entered the area to familiarize herself with the wolves, assuming they would keep their distance as they had in the past. She may have then tripped over the branches on the ground and the wolves attacked her when she appeared vulnerable. Fatal wolf attacks on humans remain extremely rare in modern North America.

4 Surinder Singh Bajwa Monkey Attack

Surinder Singh Bajwa was an Indian politician who became the Deputy Mayor of Delhi. On October 20th, 2007, he was standing on the balcony of his home when he was attacked by a group of rhesus macaques. These small monkeys live all over Asia and generally weigh five to eight pounds. Bajwa fell from the balcony while trying to fight them off and died from head injuries a day later.

Monkey packs are a continuing problem in Indian cities. Monkey-catchers have been used to reduce their numbers, as well as trainers who use larger monkeys to intimidate the macaques. Urban expansion has worsened the problems. Macaques in particular often steal food out of peoples hands, take accessories off their bodies, and even break into cars. The Hindu religion forbids killing the animals and many Hindus feed them. Biting is a common problem, as well as disease, as close to 90% of macaques in Delhi have tuberculosis. Tighter pet restrictions have criminalized the use of the larger monkeys to scare macaques away. Alternate solutions including electric shock tape for buildings and sterilization campaigns have begun in Indian cities, but tens of thousands of macaques still plague Delhi today.

3 Chandra Nash Chimpanzee Attack

Travis was a male chimpanzee born in private captivity and adopted by Connecticut couple Sandra and Jerome Herold when he was only three days old. Travis grew up as a local celebrity, riding in the Herold’s tow truck, dressing himself, eating at the dinner table, watching baseball on TV, using the computer, and even driving a car. The Herold’s only human child has died in a car accident, so the couple pampered the chimp in her place. Travis usually got along well with his neighbors, but in 2003 he jumped out of a car and chased a man who threw something at him. A law was quickly passed in Connecticut forbidding pet primates over fifty pounds. Although Travis was over two hundred pounds, authorities allowed the Herolds to keep him because they did not believe he posed any threat. They were wrong.

On February 16th, 2009, Travis stole Sandra Herold’s keys and left the house. Herold called her friend Charla Nash to help bring him back inside. But when Charla arrived, Travis attacked her. Herold hit Travis with a shovel and stabbed him, but the attack continued. Herold retreated to a car and called the police, who arrived and killed Travis. Nash miraculously survived the attack, but lost her hands and most of her face, and suffered significant brain injury. Several years later, she received an experimental face transplant. Travis knew Nash, but she had a new haircut at the time and he may have become enraged because she was holding his favorite toy: a Tickle-Me-Elmo. Travis’ autopsy also showed that he had been given Xanax shortly before the incident, which has a possible side effect of rage and paranoia in humans.

2 Taylor Mitchell Coyote Attack

Taylor Luciow, better known as Taylor Mitchell, was a 19-year-old emerging Canadian folk singer who released her first and only album in 2009. She went on a solo tour of eastern Canada the same year. On October 27th, Mitchell had free time between tour stops and decided to go on a solo hike in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. An American couple would later report seeing two coyotes while they were hiking at the same time as Mitchell. The coyotes seemed to be unafraid of them. Six minutes later, the Americans heard what sounded like a woman or an animal screaming. They called the authorities at a phone booth in the parking lot, and told a group of four other hikers what had happened.

The four hikers went out on the trail and found Mitchell’s keys, pocket knife, and pieces of torn clothing. They also spotted blood on a bathroom door. Further along the trail, they found Mitchell on the ground with a coyote standing over her. She was bitten on most of her body and had serious head injuries but she was conscious at the time. Rescuers could not scare the animal away until a police officer arrived and fired at it. Mitchell was rushed to the hospital but died of blood loss. Experts theorized that the coyotes may have been rabid, had interbred with wolves or dogs, or were starving. It is possible that Mitchell may have disturbed a den or tried to feed them, but none of these theories could be proven. Mitchell was a nature lover and her family did not want any animals to be killed, but multiple coyotes were shot by wardens and identified as the attackers through blood on their fur.

1 Dawn Brancheau Orca Attack

Dawn Brancheau fulfilled her childhood dream of becoming an orca trainer and began working at SeaWorld Orlando in 1994. By 2006, she had become a poster girl for the company and married a fellow performer. But her dream became a nightmare on February 24th, 2010. Brancheau was performing a dinner show with Tilikum, the largest orca at the park. At the end of the show, the whale grabbed her by either her ponytail or her arm and pulled her into the pool in front of the guests. Tilikum kept her underwater for 45 minutes while employees tried to distract him. They eventually coaxed him into a small tank where they could reach Brancheau’s body. Her scalp had been pulled off, her elbow and knee dislocated, her spinal cord severed, and other bones fractured. The autopsy found that she had died from a combination of drowning and blunt force trauma.

SeaWorld temporarily forbade trainers from entering the water with orcas after the attack and OSHA forced the ban to become permanent. Tilikum had previously killed two other people, 21-year-old trainer Keltie Byrne and 27-year-old park guest Daniel P. Dukes, who had hidden in the park after closing and then entered Tilikum’s pool. SeaWorld repeatedly tried to appeal court decisions that prevented water performances, but in 2014 the D.C. Court of Appeals sided with OSHA. Justice Brett Kavanaugh was the sole judge to side with SeaWorld. Brancheau’s death was heavily featured in the documentary Blackfish. Despite the negative attention from the film, Tilikum returned to performing in 2011. He later died of a bacterial infection in 2017.

Top 10 Bizarre Biting Attacks

Even more than two decades after the World Trade Center was destroyed, it remains the defining event of the 21st Century. For years it made terrorism the fear in the forefront of the cultural consciousness. It also completely overshadowed centuries of terrorist activity, and in the process contributed to a highly skewed vision of the past and how relatively peaceful supposedly was. Yet issues that have long slid into obscurity have cost dozens if not hundreds of people their lives at a stroke. 

10. The Haymarket Affair

Today working class people are so venerated by the American mainstream that it can be jarring to look back at how brutal law enforcement was willing to be with them. On May 3, 1886, workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company in Chicago, Illinois were protesting for eight hour shifts, a movement which had been underway since at least the 1860s. To protect scabs, the police fired on the workers, resulting in one death and several injuries. That rapidly escalated the conflict so that the next day there were well over 1,000 protesters, and during a clash with the police, a bomb was thrown by an unknown individual into the ranks of the police. Accounts vary on how many deaths were caused by the explosion and how many were from resulting friendly fire, the end result was eleven people were killed, seven of them police officers. A further 100 people were wounded. 

 In further reprisal, the state of Illinois accused and convicted eight anarchist leaders of being responsible for the bombing despite a lack of evidence. Of those one committed suicide in prison, four were executed on November 11, 1887. In 1893, Governor John Altgeld pardoned the surviving three accused for being the victims of an unjust trial. Given that there was evidence that jury members had expressed that they believed the defendants were guilty before the proceedings even began and that all of the accused had alibis that they weren’t present at the protest and witnesses testifying they hadn’t thrown the bomb, it’s an understandable judgement.  

9. Los Angeles Times Bombing

By 1910, labor conflicts had, if anything, become even more dangerous, even in heavily unionized communities such as Los Angeles. One of the more flamboyant enemies of unions was Los Angeles Times owner Harrison Otis, who paid strikebreakers to attack workers and thus was so hated that he rode in a limousine armed with a cannon. He’s credited with coining the phrase “you’re either with me or you’re against me.” Two ironworking brothers named James and John McNamara conspired to scare him by setting off sixteen sticks of dynamite in the publication’s basement on September 30, 1910. They did not realize that there were gas lines under the building or how flammable the ink was, and thus they set a horrific fire that killed 21 people and left dozens more injured. One who was not killed was Otis, who hired William Burns, one of the most celebrated private detectives in the nation at the time. 

The brothers evaded arrest until April 1911, when their explosives supplier Ortie McManigal named them in his confession. Famed lawyer Clarence Darrow took their defense case, and supposedly his own investigation found even more evidence that the McNamaras were guilty. The brothers confessed their crimes, and they were extremely fortunate that the senior John McNamara got a life sentence and James received a fifteen-year sentence. That was fewer years than they set back the cause of labor rights in America.  

8. Wall Street Bombing

September seems to be a particularly fateful month for New York City in terms of terrorist attacks. Almost exactly ten years after the Los Angeles Times Bombing, on September 16, 1920 at approximately 12:00 p.m., a recently abandoned cart parked at 23 Wall Street across the street from the J. P. Morgan Building exploded. The explosion sent iron sash weights placed around dynamite flying, overturned nearby vehicles, and left 38 people dead and 300 injured. Among the wounded victims was J. P. Morgan’s grandson Junius. 

Unlike the LA Times bombing, there was no closure from a trial because no group took credit for the bombing and no leads surfaced. Italian anarchist radical Pierto Angelo was suspected, and though he had an alibi which prevented him from being charged, he was deported anyway. There were thousands of arrests and interrogations, including hundreds of stable and window sash weight factory employees, but the case was declared closed in 1940 no closer to being solved than it was on the day of the attack.   

7. Bath School Disaster

The seeds of this attack seemed to have been sewn in 1922, when the community of Bath, Michigan built the Consolidated School. Local property taxes had been raised to pay for the purchase, which got to local farmer Andrew Kehoe sufficiently that he got elected school board treasurer and heatedly kept the school’s budget down. In May 1927, the repossession of his farm looming, he smuggled World War I surplus dynamite into the school’s basement, and set off a time-activated bomb on the 18th at 8:45. Discontent with the damage he had done, he drove to the site with a trunk full of even more explosives, and killed himself and five other people. Total deaths from the school attack included 38 students and six adults. It was set to be much worse, as there were hundreds of additional pounds of explosives in the basement that failed to go off. Kehoe had also killed his wife and several farm animals and set his farmhouse on fire. When police arrived at the scene, they found posted on his fence a brief but chilling manifesto “Criminals are made, not born.” 

While this act sounds like it should have become one of the most famous atrocities in American history and the perpetrator as infamous as Ed Gein or Charles Whitman, there was a very simple explanation for why it dropped out of the broader culture memory very quickly.  Three days later, Charles Lindbergh’s famous iconic solo transatlantic flight concluded successfully, and for most of the summer dominated headlines nationwide. Some historical publications, such as a 2018 article by Time, have asserted that if Kehoe had destroyed some institution such as a bank, as some people were doing in that era (especially during the upcoming Great Depression) then he might have garnered some public sympathy. 

6. An Assassination in Marseille

As far as 20th Century reigns go, that of Alexander I in Serbia was one of the more mixed. He was a hero of the Balkan Wars that prefigured World War I, and then he spent that momentous conflict as commander in chief of the Serbian military, and was declared Prince Regent on October 31, 1918. Yet within three years there was a major assassination attempt, which echoed how the previous Alexander of Serbia had been assassinated in 1903. In 1922 he formally took the throne, and soon had to deal with Croat separatists that went so far as to assassinate his Croat deputies. In 1929 he stepped up his unification policies by declaring himself dictator and passing standardization reforms, just in time for the Great Depression. To ease tensions he formed alliances and went on diplomatic missions. Despite his successes, the people still wanted a parliamentary government. Alexander I was in the planning stages of creating one when he went on a trip to France and met his fate on October 9, 1934 in the city of Marseille. His assassin was Vlado Chernozemski, one of the Croatian separatists that had been causing Alexander so much trouble for years.    

Alexander I’s assassination had the distinction of being the first filmed act of terrorism, nearly thirty years before the iconic Zapruder Film. According to a Columbia University paper on the subject, Adolf Hitler supposedly watched and rewatched the footage to study the reaction of the French police, convincing himself their inability to protect the King showed a lack of national character. Whatever the truth of that, there’s little doubt that the terrorist act set in motion many military efforts such as Mussolini and Hitler’s incursions towards the Balkans through the 1930s that would plunge Europe into another war by the end of the decade. That means that by a little noted coincidence, a Serbian assassin started World War I by killing Archduke Ferdinand and 20 years later another helped start World War II. 

5. Ford Motor Protests

Despite decades of setbacks, the Great Depression led to a surge in expanded labor rights, and with this growing worker power many larger companies became only more ruthless than ever. One Harry Bennett, often described as Henry Ford’s “right hand man” had always been aggressive in stomping out union activity in Ford factories, and on March 7, 1932 he reached an entirely new level. That day 3,000 unemployed Ford employees were marching to Dearborn, Michigan in what was called the Ford Hunger March. It quickly became the Ford Massacre when Bennett’s men opened fire, including with a machine gun. Bennett in particular was so enraged that some protesters threw rocks at him that he emptied his own gun, took a gun from a police officer, and emptied that. In total four marchers were killed, two of them teenagers, and dozens were wounded, some of the wounded being arrested in the following days while still on hospital beds.  

Yet the workers continued the fight. On May 26, 1937,  United Auto Workers members, including members of the 174 chapter of the Women’s Auxiliary, were handing out leaflets at the Miller Road overpass, again in Dearborn, Michigan. Bennett, ever hands on in his anti-union attacks, descended. In the subsequent beatings, one man’s back was broken, one man was kicked down flights of stairs, and newspaper men that happened to be present were also attacked. One particularly clever photographer named James Kilpatrick surrendered some blank film he hadn’t yet shot while hiding his photo negatives. This was a boon for the union because the photos made it clear that the anti-union people were the aggressors, and public support swung to the employees. Within four years, the Ford employees were a recognized union. 

4. The Lustgarten Attack

Most portrayals of Jews living the Third Reich depict them entirely as victims, but history shows incidents of pushback. On May 18, 1942, the almost exclusively Jewish Baum Gruppe, led by Herbert Baum, attacked a Reich art exhibit in Lustgarten, Berlin. Surprisingly the exhibit that drew their ire wasn’t anti-semitic, but anti-Soviet, as it was derisively called “the Soviet Paradise.” The attack mostly consisted of such ineffective arson that the exhibit reopened the next day. In their defense, the Baum Gruppe was mostly youths and nothing like seasoned partisans.  

Unsurprisingly, the response was swift and merciless. Nearly 500 Jews were arrested, and of them many were summarily shot. The New York Times reported at the time that 258 prisoners were executed. Despite their draconian response, the Gestapo made a point of claiming that Herbert Baum committed suicide in his cell instead of being executed. Why they bothered with such a public relations gesture was unclear. Rarely has one person’s terrorist ever so clearly been another person’s freedom fighter.  

3. The Machertos

Whatever a person’s position regarding relations between the United States and its territory Puerto Rico, it is clearly a sight better than it was in the 20th Century. For example, on March 1, 1954 members of a Puerto Rican independence group entered the House of Representatives chambers and wounded five representatives.  Between 1974 and 1981, there were reported to have committed 100 bombings in the US, many committed by the Armed Forces of National Liberation. The most harmful of these was in January 1975 at the Fraunces Tavern in Lower Manhattan which killed four people and wounded 53. 

By the late ’70s, the US military was firmly in the sights of such groups as the Machertos. On July 14, 1980 four navigation installations run by the Federal Aviation Administration and Coast Guard were destroyed, disrupting Latin American air traffic. But the most elaborate single attack was surely when the Machertos entered the Muniz Air National Guard Base. As reported by the Washington Post on January 16, 1981, they destroyed eight fighter jets and disabled two others. Fortunately no one was injured, but the damage was estimated to have cost $45 million. While this was a long time ago, it’s still a living memory for many, and should be something for people that want statehood for Puerto Rico. 

2. FLQ Attacks

Speaking of seperatist movements, In the early 1960s the Canadian province of Quebec witnessed the emergence of the Front de Libération du Québec. Their stated aim was to remove all British influence from Canada. Ironically, one of the founding figures of the movement wasn’t a Canadian, but a Belgian named Georges Schoeters. Nevertheless they quickly showed they were willing to use violence to achieve their aims. They sent bombs to Royal government buildings and mail boxes for years, and then expanded to sending bombs to businesses where employees were on strike. They were so numerous that one Pierre Paul Geoffroy would plead guilty to taking part in 31 bombings. The Globe and Mail reported that the human toll for the first six years of the campaign was five killed and one grievously injured. 

Yet at the time the most significant action related to the FLQ wasn’t one of their attacks but the Canadian government’s reaction to it. In 1970 the separatists switched to kidnappings, most notably of UK diplomat James Cross and Quebec Deputy Premier Pierre Laporte. In response the government used the War Measures Act to suspend civil liberties, which was felt to be considered so draconian that the period was known as the October Crisis. While James Cross was recovered alive, Laporte’s body was recovered from a trunk. From there the FLQ became so unpopular and so heavily infiltrated by government agents that it was reportedly stamped out by 1976.      

1. Inn Din

Southeastern Asia has often been a bit of a blind spot to Western nations. So in 2017 when more than 690,000 Rohingya Muslims fled from Bangladesh sought refuge in Myanmar, much of the rest of the World took little notice. In Bangladesh there was so much hostility towards them which was so officially sanctioned that the 2014 Bangladesh census did not include Rohingyas at all. It wasn’t until word of what paramilitary forces were inflicting on Rohingya that attention was paid. 

On September 1, 2018, ten men in a Rohingya community around Inn Din (a community on the northwestern coast of Myanmar) were imprisoned. They were forced to watch as their neighbors dug a mass grave, and then ten of them were executed and buried the next morning. The same paramilitary force that performed the mass murder then raided other Rohingya homes, stealing cattle and vehicles and burning down houses. The official story was that the people put to death were part of a 200-person terrorist group attacking the town of Inn Din, but local civilians denied that there was any such terrorist attack. In fact civilian witnesses reported that the ten people put to death had just been part of a group seeking shelter on a beach. Reports for Reuters looking into the attack was arrested for their efforts. Such is the horrifying danger facing refugees in places all around the world today, and what many of us who may be joining them in the future may look forward to. 

Dustin Koski highly recommends Jonathan “Bogleech” Wojcik’s novel Return of the Living, a story of Earth centuries after it’s been ghosted. 

As yet another September rolls by, people worldwide are reminded of the terror that shook the world 19 years ago. As is often the case, many commemorate this terrible event by sharing memories of where they were on what they thought would be just another ordinary workday.

10 Reasons Some Remain Suspicious Of The Official 9/11 Account

In my case, being from South Africa, I first heard the news while driving back from work on 11 September 2001 at around 4 pm. It was the first time I had heard of the towers and couldn’t make sense of the reports over the radio. Seeing the visuals on TV later, I remember not understanding why a pilot couldn’t see the massive towers right in front of him. Then, as reality dawned, I remember feeling as though the world had been changed in a way that could never be undone.

There have been many terrorist attacks after that infamous day, and just as on 9/11, many heroes have stepped up to save the lives of others, regardless of their own safety.

On this list are just some of their stories.

10 Mumbai Terrorist Attack

“It was my responsibility… I may have been the youngest person in the room, but I was still doing my job.”

On 26 November 2008, ten members of Lashkar-e-Taiba started a reign of terror in Mumbai that lasted four days. The gunmen travelled from Pakistan to Mumbai via boat, hijacking a fishing trawler on the way. They killed four crewmembers, slit the captain’s throat, and threw the bodies overboard. Once in Mumbai, they split into three groups, stormed several buildings, and started their killing spree with automatic weapons and grenades. By 29 November, more than 170 people were dead, over 300 wounded and 9 of the attackers were also dead. The lone surviving gunman was sentenced to death and executed on 21 November 2012.

One of the buildings attacked was the Taj Mahal Palace hotel. Alongside all the guests, there was a hosted dinner for Unilever directors and executives managed by around 35 Taj Mumbai employees. While serving the main course, loud bangs sounded up and those inside the restaurant initially thought they were hearing fireworks. However, staff very quickly realized something wasn’t right and the banquet manager, 24-year-old Mallika Jagad, instructed guests to lie down under the tables. She separated husbands and wives and urged them to refrain from using cell phones. While the rest of the hotel was ravaged by the terrorists, the group in the restaurant remained quiet and were looked after by hotel staff. The next morning, after a fire had started, guests were rescued by a fire crew.

Jagad later said that even though she was the youngest person in the room, she felt that she had to continue doing her job and her guests’ safety was her number one priority.

Her quick actions saved the lives of more than 60 people.^[1]

9 Pulse Gay Nightclub Shooting

“He helped so many people. My son! A hero!”

While patrons of Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, were having a great time dancing on 12 June 2016 they could never have predicted that the night would end in tragedy. 29-year-old security guard, Omar Mateen, entered the club and started shooting. He killed 49 people and wounded 53 others. Mateen was shot and killed after a three-hour stand-off with police and negotiators. During this time, he told one of the negotiators that he had perpetrated the attack in retaliation to the US killing of Abu Waheeb in Iraq. The FBI declared the incident a terrorist attack.

When the shooting began, there were many patrons and staff who stepped up and tried to save the lives of others with no concern for their own safety. One of these heroes was Imran Yousuf who was employed as a bouncer at Pulse. His Marine Corps training kicked in and he saved more than 60 people who had been trapped inside the building. Other heroes included Ray Rivera, Joshua McGill, and Christopher Hansen.

Hansen continued to help two people who had been injured and bleeding outside the club, while the shooting continued relentlessly inside. It was his first time at the club, and he never envisioned the night ending with him taking off his bandana and using it to stop the bleeding of a man who had been shot in the back. He also helped a woman who had a gunshot wound to the arm and promised to stay with her until paramedics could get to her.

Hansen’s father later wrote on Facebook: “I am so proud of my son. Both as a man, and as a gay man. He helped so many people. My son! A hero! Amongst all the tragedy, helping others.”^[2]

8 French Terrorist Attack

“He was concentrating on me; in that moment he could not kill people.”

Just over a month after the Orlando tragedy, terror struck again, this time in Nice, France. There were crowds of people celebrating Bastille Day on the Promenade des Anglais on 14 July 2016, when a 19-tonne cargo truck drove straight into them. The truck was driven by Mohamed Lahouaej-Bouhlel, a Tunisian who had a residence in France. The attack cost the lives of 86 people with a further 458 injured. Lahouaej-Bouhlel was shot and killed by police and the Islamic State afterwards claimed responsibility for the attack.

Just before the tragedy, a local airport worker named Franck Terrier was on his motorcycle on the way to the promenade to meet up with his son. His wife was with him and they stopped to get some ice-cream. At this point the truck sped past him and Franck saw the vehicle driving into people. Thinking about his son who was at the end of the promenade, Franck jumped on his motorcycle and started chasing the truck. He leaped off the bike, clung to the side of the truck door and started hitting Lahouaej-Bouhlel over the head and in the face as hard as he could. The attacker tried to shoot at Franck, but the gun wouldn’t go off. He then hit him with the gun and Franck fell from the side of the truck, breaking a rib.

Franck said afterwards that he was pleased that he was able to distract the attacker from killing more people as he was only focused on getting him off the truck. Franck and another hero, Gwenaël Leriche, received medals from the City of Nice for trying to stop the terrorist.^[3]

7 Boston Marathon Bombing

“I know exactly when my life changed: when I looked into the face of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.”

When two pressure cooker bombs detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on 15 April 2013, there was instant confusion and panic. Three people were killed, hundreds injured, and 17 people lost limbs. As people tried to escape, several heroes emerged who did their best to help them as well as assist those who had been injured.

Carlos Arredondo, Devin Wang, and Paul Mitchell rushed an injured Jeff Bauman from the scene and were later credited with helping to save his life after he suffered traumatic injuries. Bauman, who lost both of his legs, helped to identify one of the brothers responsible for the bombings.

Many of the runners who were near the explosion ran on to help victims, despite having just run 26 miles and being exhausted. Some ran to Mass General Hospital to donate blood. Dr. Allan Panter was at the finish line, waiting for his wife to finish the race when the blast happened. He immediately ran to an injured woman, keeping her airway open until paramedics got there. He helped several other victims and controlled the bleeding from their wounds.^[4]

6 Berlin Terrorist Attack

2016 was a year of heightened Islamist terrorist activity in Europe with attacks in Brussels, Nice, Germany, and Normandy. Six days before Christmas, the Christmas market next to the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church in Berlin was buzzing with visitors. This market is one of over 70 in Berlin where tourists can purchase various arts and crafts.

Suddenly there was a commotion and people looked up from their perusing to see a large truck headed straight towards them. The driver was Anis Amri, a failed asylum seeker, who had shot and killed the truck’s original driver Lukasz Urban. Urban’s body was in the passenger seat. Amri launched the truck into the crowd, killing 12 people and leaving 56 injured.

Luca Scata, a rookie Milan policeman who had joined the force just nine months earlier, faced off with Amri in Italy four days later. Scata and his partner asked to search Amri’s backpack when he told them he didn’t have any identity documents. Amri pulled out a gun and shot Scata’s partner in the shoulder. Scata immediately fired back at Amri, killing him.

At the time, Amri was considered Europe’s most wanted man, and Scata was hailed a hero.^[5]

10 Heroic Police Officers Who Gave Their Lives on 9/11

5 Nairobi Terrorist Attack

“What he did was so heroic… he went back in 12 times and saved 100 people”

On 21 September 2013, the Westgate shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya was buzzing with the usual shopper activity. The busy but peaceful atmosphere was shattered when a group of masked gunmen stormed the mall and started shooting and throwing grenades. The aftermath saw part of the mall collapse in a fire, 71 deaths and 200 injured people. The attack lasted several hours, and responsibility was claimed by al-Shabaab who said it was in retribution for the deployment of Kenyan soldiers in Somalia.

After the attack, an unnamed former Royal Marine was hailed as a hero when it emerged that he saved at least 100 people from the attack with only a handgun for protection. The ex-soldier was at the mall with friends when around 13 attackers began shooting at random. The man led several shoppers to safety, going back into the mall 12 times to ensure he could help as many people as possible.

He remains unnamed for security reasons.^[6]

4 Ariana Grande Concert Attack

“I ran into the bomb. I still don’t know to this day why I did it.”

Excitement was in the air in Manchester on the evening of 22 May 2017. Fans of Ariana Grande couldn’t wait for her long-anticipated Manchester Arena concert to begin. The concert was all they hoped it would be and around 14,000 fans were preparing, reluctantly, to leave the arena after the show ended.

At that point, a homemade bomb stuffed full of shrapnel, went off, killing 23 people and wounding more than 800. 22-year-old Salman Ramadan Abedi had detonated the bomb and was killed in the blast.

There were many children at the venue, along with their parents. Daren Buckley had been at the show with his son, Lewis, whom he ensured was safe after the blast. He then ran back to where the explosion had taken place and grabbed nearby t-shirts that had been on sale, to try and stem the blood loss of the wounded. Buckley continued to assist wherever he could until police arrived to secure the area. Afterwards he simply stated that he ran into the bomb but still doesn’t know why.

There is currently an ongoing public enquiry into the bombing with issues being explored such as security arrangements, planning and preparation by Abedi and his brother, emergency response and whether the attack could have been prevented.^[7]

3 Paris Siege

“He was calm and in charge.”

On 13 November 2015 Paris found itself under siege when a group of gunmen and suicide bombers hit six locations almost simultaneously, leaving 130 people dead and hundreds wounded. Explosions shook the Stade de France stadium and a fast-food outlet nearby. Attacks unfolded at popular nightlife spots around the same time. Around 12,000 emergency, health, military, and security workers responded to the ambush.

While an attack was being carried out at the Bataclan concert hall, 35-year-old Algerian security guard Didi rushed to the scene to help concert goers escape. When interviewed afterwards, Didi said that he knew he had to get as many people to safety as he could, because “these terrorists have come to kill as many people as they can.”

He followed the gunmen inside and started opening doors for people to escape through. He yelled for people to follow him to the exits. Those who followed Didi’s lead later told news reporters that the security guard was ‘calm and in charge’ and that ‘we felt secure and knew we’d be safe with him.’

Didi was awarded French citizenship in 2016.^[8]

2 Unsung Heroes

On 7 July 2005, London would forevermore be changed by a series of terrorist attacks perpetrated by four suicide bombers carrying rucksacks filled with explosives. They detonated 3 bombs on Underground trains and one on a double-decker bus during morning rush hour traffic. 52 people died and hundreds were injured. The bombers all died during the attacks.

Tremendous courage was shown by unsung heroes in the aftermath of the atrocities. One of them helped a gravely injured John Tulloch stay awake by chatting about their respective children. Cp Capt Craig Staniforth ensured that Tulloch didn’t drift off to sleep as his head injuries would probably have meant he wouldn’t wake up again.

Suhel Boodi, who’d never done CPR, tried desperately to save 29-year-old Laura Webb by following the instructions of a fellow commuter. Another hero, Steven Desborough, comforted Carrie Taylor in her last minutes, while encouraging others who had been trapped beneath debris. Teacher Tim Coulson also tried to save Michael Brewster, smashing his way out of a carriage to reach the man.^[9]

1 9/11

“Stop crying. I have to get these people out safely.”

After the towers came down on 11 September 2001, controversy bloomed. Dozens of conspiracy theories of ‘inside jobs’ and ‘explosions, not planes’ swirled the internet. Some conspiracy theorists are still looking for evidence that the Pentagon was hit by a missile and speculating about the “missing debris” of United Airlines flight 93.

However, this doesn’t overshadow the fact that nearly three thousand people lost their lives that day and that several heroes stepped up to help during one of the darkest events in US history.

24-year-old Welles Crowther (pictured) left his mother a voicemail saying that he was ok. After ending the call, he made his way to the injured. He carried a woman down 15 floors to safety and went back up to the 78th floor sky lobby to assist firefighters. His body was recovered later in a stairwell alongside some of the firefighters and a rescue tool.

Two former US Marines, Jason Thomas and Dave Karnes, got back into their uniforms to search the rubble for survivors. They found two people still alive.
On American Airlines Flight 11, two flight attendants stayed as calm as they could and relayed information that eventually helped the FBI determine that the terrorists were al- Qaeda.

Soldier and police officer, Rick Rescorla, sang songs to keep people calm during evacuations. He was head of security for Morgan Stanley which was based in the South Tower and has been credited for saving more than 2,700 lives. He was last seen on the 10th floor of the South Tower after calling his wife and telling her that she needed to stop crying because he had to get the people inside the tower to safety. He also told his wife that she made his life and that he’d never been happier.

Rescorla’s body was never found.^[10]

10 Disturbing Raw Videos From 9/11

Comedy superstars Monty Python’s famous 1969 sketch brought to our attention the very realistic dangers posed by a would-be attacker armed with a piece of fresh fruit. And while their self-defence class centered on the banana’s use as a weapon, fresh fruit’s fatal potential is no laughing matter. Whether it be from choking, poisoning, a trip hazard or a falling object – fresh fruit can kill. Here are ten cautionary tales.

Top 10 Fruits That Have Drastically Changed

10 Grapes of Wrath

Round, ripe and delicious? Don’t let their small size diminish their danger – grapes are an often-overlooked contender to kill. In 2017, a five year old boy choked to death at an after-school club after a grape had become lodged in his airway. Paramedics attempted to remove the offending object with a special pair of forceps, but it was too late. Between 1999 and 2013 in the USA, 2103 childhood deaths occurred from ‘foreign body airway obstructions’ – with grapes ranking third after only hot dogs and boiled sweets.

The British Medical Journal describes why grapes are particularly well-suited to suffocate us, especially in younger children who may not chew their food sufficiently. Soft objects are less likely to be easily expelled via the Heimlich maneuver; instead, remaining wedged in the airway – assisted by their spherical shape. Whilst pre-slicing grapes is a disaster-mitigating move, it’s no guarantee of safety. As far back as 405 BC, ancient Greek playwriter Sophocles is reported to have choked on a grape seed in his cup of wine.

9 An Apple A Day…

… keeps the Doctor away, the old adage goes; but sadly, healthy intentions can have catastrophic consequences. In May 2016, a 22 month old toddler in New Zealand was left permanently paralyzed after suffocating on a slice of apple, prompting cardiac arrest and leaving him with severe motor disabilities. A near-miss, but a tragic warning nonetheless.

Choking aside, apple seeds could potentially pose poison risks. Containing a compound called amygdalin, when the seed is crushed or chewed, this amygdalin produces hydrogen cyanide – lethal in high enough doses, around 50-300mg for an adult. A single apple seed is estimated to contain 0.6mg of cyanide – meaning you’d need to consume between 83 and 500 apple seeds to develop acute poisoning— so while munching on one Golden Delicious won’t kill you, excessive indulgence could.

8 Going Bananas

Another popular misconception is that eating six or seven bananas in a row could kill you via potassium poisoning. This simply isn’t true; scientists estimate a lethal dose would accumulate from ingesting over 400 a day – before which being sick would almost surely remove the offending article from your system. And whilst bananas are also radioactive, it would take roughly seven years of eating 274 a day to develop acute symptoms.

Yet perhaps bananas’ deadliest danger is their skin: the butt of many a slapstick sketch, slipping on a banana was no joke for the young boy who slipped at an intersection of Newark, New Jersey on July 2, 1920. Although his cause of death was noted as the truck who ran him over, the banana’s contribution is not to be overlooked. More recently, in 2013, a man slipped on a banana peel and into the path of an oncoming Staten Island subway train. Scared to go out and about with this slippery yellow assassin on the loose? There is some hope: 99% of all exported bananas are a hardy variety called the Cavendish, but highly susceptible to a strain of disease which could one day wipe them out.

7 Not Very A-Peeling

If fatally slipping on fruit peel seems stupid to some, surely an experienced stuntsperson ought to know better, right? Unfortunately, even the most daredevil amongst us are not immune from fresh fruits’ upsetting influence. In 1911, English showman Bobby Leach became the second person to successfully survive a trip over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Despite a few scrapes and knocks, he was altogether unharmed, celebrating with a cigar. Ironic, then, that his ultimate demise – fifteen years later – came at the hands of a humble orange peel. After slipping over on the street, Leach’s broken leg became infected, and without the availability of antibiotics he died during surgery.

Perhaps Whole Foods had the right idea when, in 2016, they marketed pre-peeled oranges in plastic packaging. Despite environmental backlash on social media (a criticism resulting in the product being pulled), maybe the grocery store were simply trying to save customers from the perils of the peel.

6 Presidential Peril

It’s not just daredevils who have died at the hands of fresh fruit; in 1850 the 12th US President – Zachory Taylor – met a sticky end after a brush with some cherries. Recently elected, the President was celebrating in the grounds of what would become the Washington Monument. Five days later, aged just 65, he was dead – having survived a recent war with Mexico, a theory persists he met his maker through his selection of tasty picnic treats.

Doctors decreed that President Taylor died from ‘cholera mobus’—prevalent in an era of poor sewage and sanitation—a bacteria present in the water he drank directly as well as the water used to wash fruit. Urban myths at the time attributed the onset of stomach cramps to consuming a large amount of fruit and milk at the same time—in particular a vast volume of cherries.

5 Melancholy Melon

Fatal fruit-based bacteria attacks are by no means limited to Presidents. Listeria is most commonly associated with unpasteurized dairy products and chilled pre-packaged sandwiches, but sadly, fruit-related incidents have also occurred. In 2011, the CDC reported fifteen people who died after consuming contaminated cantaloupe melon, along with an additional 72 illnesses: making it the deadliest food-borne outbreak of illness in America since 1998.

In 2018, four people in New South Wales died from listeria contracted from contaminated rockmelons, prompting the fruit to be pulled from supermarket shelves. Pregnancy increases your chances of contracting listeria tenfold, so if you’re expecting, perhaps give the melons a miss.

4 Lethal Lychees

So what if something isn’t toxic outright, and isn’t carrying a bacteria-borne infection – safe, right? Not necessarily. In 2017, research published in the Lancet pointed the finger at lychees for poisoning over 100 children a year in northern India. For those willing to prise open a spiky outer shell, lychee fruit is an exotic and tasty treat. Yet unripe examples contain a chemical called hypoglicin, a toxin that can cause extremely low blood sugar – causing a change in brain functioning, leading to loss of consciousness and death.

To children already undernourished and underfed, snacking on lychees proved even more potent. Half of the victims admitted to hospital in Muzaffarpur, northern India, never recovered.

3 Enduring a Durian attack

Simply swearing off eating exotic fruit may not be sufficient to save you from their evil effects. In 2012, a Malaysian man was killed whilst a basket of durian fruit fell from the back of his bike, inflicting serious head injuries. Named in some regions as the ‘King of fruits’, the durian fruit’s thorn-covered shell can grow as large as 12 inches, typically weighing 2-7 pounds.

A Malaysian saying maintains that durian fruit has eyes, and can see where it is falling; signs around trees warn locals not to linger around orchards. However, there may be hope: owing to its particularly pungent odor, durian fruit has been banned on many types of public transport across Asia. In Singapore, signs ban it from hotels and taxis: although its aroma may not be as lethal as its ballistic capabilities, probably best to leave it be.

2 A Lovely Bunch of Coconuts

After all this doom and gloom, perhaps an escape to a tropical island (complete with pina colada) would be the perfect way to relax? Sun, sand, sea, and – sudden head trauma. In 1984, a Canadian doctor returning from Papua New Guinea and Angola estimated the annual death toll from falling coconuts to be around 150 people a year. Although his statistics were unfounded, deaths do undeniably occur in this way. In 2010, broadcasters reported the Indian government had ordered the removal of all coconuts from the Ghandi Museum in Mumbai, for fear of killing President Barack Obama in yet another fruit-focused presidential demise.

Even whilst cradling your coconut, you’re not quite out of the woods (or palm trees). In 1923, a Pennsylvanian man struggling to crack open a coconut decided to smash it open with his revolver butt: unfortunately, the revolver discharged, fatally shooting the man in the abdomen.

1 ‘Little Apple of Death’

Finally, a fruit (and its tree) so deadly you’d be wise to steer clear of altogether. The ‘Machineel’ tree (‘manazilla de la muerte’ in Spanish, translating as ‘little apple of death’) is common along Caribbean shores and notoriously lethal. The tree itself produces a powerful irritant in its sap; touching the bark, or simply standing beneath the tree can cause injury, as can attempting to burn it. Although its bright green fruit resemble ripe apples, toxic effects include severe gastroenteritis, swelling of the airway and throat, and internal bleeding.

Shipwrecked sailors across the centuries have fallen fall of these ‘paradise apples’; Juan Ponce de Leon – famous European explorer or 1513 – is also purported to have died at the hands of the poisonous plant.

So in the closing words of Monty Python – ‘When you’re walking home tonight and some great homicidal maniac comes after you with a bunch of loganberries, don’t come crying to me!’

10 Fascinating Facts You Didn’t Know About Fruits

About The Author: Freelance aviation writer and builder of hot-air-balloons, when I’ve not got my head in the clouds I’m far more down-to-earth with pen and paper.

Hamsters: incredibly cute little critters. They’re best known for ambling around their sawdust-filled cages and lapping from their little water droppers. Hamsters, mice, rats, and other rodents make popular pets, especially among children. However, these pets have the potential to turn deadly.

Here are ten times the chubby little rodents have brought about tragedy.

Related: 10 People Killed By Animals You Wouldn’t Expect

10 Thomas Magee, 2005

One afternoon, a woman collected her new pet from a PetSmart store in Rhode Island. The little hamster was skittish, rattling around in his cardboard carrier on the drive back home. When releasing him into his new cage, the woman was bitten on the finger. It drew a tiny pinprick of blood, but she thought nothing of it—he was just nervous about his new home, perhaps.

Shortly after that, the woman suffered a stroke due to unrelated causes. She was on the U.S. Organ Donor list, and her family was glad that her organs could go on to help others lead fulfilling lives.

Massachusetts General Hospital was, at this time, overseeing the treatment of Thomas Magee. He needed a liver transplant, and the unnamed hamster owner was a match. The surgery went ahead with few complications; however, five days post-surgery, Magee presented with high blood pressure and a fever.

A month post-surgery, Thomas Magee was dead.

The woman’s liver was not the only organ donated—both lungs and a kidney had also been donated and already implanted into two successful matches in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Unfortunately, both of these other patients would also later die.

The deaths were eventually found to be a case of lymphocytic choriomeningitis virus (LCMV). Rodents can occasionally infect humans with this saliva-borne disease, though it usually presents as cold and flu symptoms.nk3] Unfortunately, as organ transplants demand a patient be immunosuppressed, the three organ recipients were at the mercy of the viral infection. This scenario was not limited to these three patients as the video above reveals.^[1]

9 Hong Kong, 2022

On January 15th in Hong Kong, a 23-year-old pet-shop worker tested positive for the Covid-19 Delta variant. This was “bizarre,” as Hong Kong had maintained a totally zero-covid approach.

Digging deeper, officials decided to test the animals at the pet shop for a possible viral jump from animal to human. Here, they detected SARS-CoV-2 in 11 of 28 Syrian hamsters. Some of these hamsters had caught the disease in the Netherlands in 2021, where it had then spread among the little critters during shipping.

This caused an outbreak of roughly 50 Covid cases before being swiftly suppressed. Part of this suppression involved the collection and mass culling of 2,000 pet shop hamsters and other small pets. However, there was no evidence that anyone caught the virus from the infected hamsters.^[2]

8 Hong Kong, 2013

This wasn’t the first time hamsters had caused chaos in Hong Kong. In April 2013, a young girl was playing with her pet hamster. Suddenly, the hamster bit the 11-year-old on the pinky finger of her right hand. Returning the hamster to its cage, the young girl calmly walked to the kitchen, and her dad cleaned the wound.

Shortly afterward, the girl developed cramps and passed out. She was rushed to the Prince of Wales hospital in Sha Tin. However, it was too late—shortly after 2 am, she was declared dead.

Pediatrician Dr. Anthony Ng Wing-Keung stated that as the girl was asthmatic, there was the very rare chance she developed anaphylaxis, which is a rapid and serious allergic reaction that can affect breathing passages.^[3]

7 Ashley Green, 2007

Father of two, Ashley Green, almost suffered a similar fate at the last young girl. In 2007, the British man was playing with the family pet hamster, Sydney, when the rodent took a tumble. When he went to catch the hamster, the rodent bit his hand.

His wife describes how “within seconds, he began to wheeze. I knew straight away he must be allergic because the previous year he suffered a massive anaphylactic reaction to penicillin.”

The man’s face started to turn grey, and he was whisked off to a nearby hospital. The doctors battled for four days to stabilize his blood pressure. Thankfully, Green made a full recovery, and Sydney was rehomed shortly afterward.^[4]

6 North America, 2005

In 2005, two young boys from South Carolina and Minnesota fell ill. One had just bought a hamster, the other a small mouse. Unfortunately, both rodents died shortly after being bought home. Nevertheless, the boys’ conditions worsened; others around them also started to suffer from abdominal cramps, fever, vomiting, and bloody diarrhea.

In total, six people were hospitalized. The symptoms matched severe cases of salmonella, but the virus was resistant to five major bactericides (ampicillin, chloramphenicol, streptomycin, sulfisoxazole, and tetracycline).

Ultimately, all 28 primary hamster-caused salmonella patients survived.^[5]

5 United States, 1974

In a research lab in North America, a mysterious outbreak saw medical staff suffering from fever, chest pain, and malaise.

As some staff deteriorated further, blood tests were conducted: it was found to be lymphocytic choriomeningitis. This serious condition can be fatal, as the symptoms can overlap those of meningitis and encephalitis. In addition, locked neck muscles and seizures can soon follow infection.

After some time, all of the research team survived, though the lab hamster population was severely damaged.^[6]

4 United States, 1942

Another outbreak of lymphocytic choriomeningitis was discovered in 1942. This time it was at a cancer research facility, and workers were handling and breeding the small rodents. The facility had been injecting specimens with LCMV-infected tumor cells and had recently increased the rodent population and duration of experiments.

As a result, the viral load was considered large enough to make the interspecies leap: seven employees came down with the virus, though no fatalities were recorded.^[7]

3 Colombia, 2013

Technically, these last few aren’t Mesocricetus auratus but are still small pet rodents. Syrian hamsters could theoretically carry the same viral loads. However, there have been no recorded cases linked explicitly to the pet hamster.

In 2013, doctors in Colombia turned to the CDC for help with a case. A 41-year-old man with HIV had come in, suffering from fatigue, weight loss, fever, and coughing. Full-body scans revealed growths in his lungs, liver, and adrenal glands.

However, the scans on his lungs puzzled the doctors immensely. The cancer cells were tiny, approximately 10x smaller than human cancer cells. The tumor cells also appeared to be morphing together, a behavior rarely seen in human cancer cells.

After three months of testing, the CDC found dwarf tapeworm DNA in the tumor cells. Three days later, the man was dead. They concluded that the dwarf tapeworm that had infected the man had then mutated into cancerous tumors.

Dwarf tapeworm is incredibly common in rodents from pet shops. An epidemiological survey and genetic analysis found that 24.6% of hamsters, mice, and rats in pet shops presented with Hymenolepis nana.

Realistically, developing cancer cells from a hamster infected with H. nana is unbelievably rare. Experts say this was only possible thanks to the man’s severely low number of T-cells due to his HIV diagnosis.^[8]

2 United States, 1997

In May 1997, in the southwestern U.S., a young farmhand started suffering severe respiratory distress. He died very quickly. Mere days before the young man died, his fiancée had also passed away in a similar manner. No initial viral matches seemed to give an answer for the two deaths.

Dr. James Cheek of the Indian Health Service (IHS) stated, “I think if it hadn’t been for that initial pair of people that became sick within a week of each other, we never would have discovered the illness at all.”

Five others shortly died similarly in the Four Corners region. The CDC launched a full response, sending tissue samples to labs and narrowing down the virus to a new form of hantavirus.

The deer mouse was found to be the most-infected specimen of rodent in the area, leading scientists to believe that deer mice had been responsible for the rapid infection of a community. Upon the isolation of this new virus, the disease was named hantavirus pulmonary syndrome.^[9]

1 United States, 2013

In August 2013, a 10-year-old child was suffering from vomiting, headaches, and leg pains. His physician diagnosed him with a stomach bug and prescribed him some anti-nausea medication. He went home, and throughout the next three days, his situation deteriorated rapidly before he collapsed.

Resuscitation was attempted but, after an hour, was deemed unsuccessful. The autopsy noted a small scratch on his body. Ten days beforehand, the boy had brought a second pet rat home. With suspicions in mind, his liver was sent for testing, as was one of the pet rats.

The test returned a positive case of Streptobacillus moniliformis. This is a bacteria that causes the titular “Rat Bite Fever.” Approximately one in 10 bites might cause infection, and if left untreated, it has a fatality rate of 13%.^[10]

Animals, especially wild animals, are predictably unpredictable. Seemingly cute and cuddly one minute, vicious predators the next. Most people who live close to nature understand this and take reasonable precautions. But these animal attacks from 2022 show that sometimes the unexpected occurs and can have horrifying consequences

10 Tiger Attacks Zookeeper

The year 2022 got off to a rough start for three zookeepers at Nasu Safari Park in Japan when they were attacked by a 400-pound (181-kilogram) Bengal tiger. On January 4, the first worker to arrive at the park, a 26-year-old woman, went into the building where the animals are caged to do a safety check. But the tigers hadn’t been locked up properly the night before.

So once inside, she found the tiger, Volta, in the corridor. Volta pounced, eventually biting off the young woman’s hand. Two of the woman’s co-workers heard her screams and tried to help but were also attacked. It took over 30 minutes for the veterinarian on staff to tranquilize Volta. In the end, all three workers were hospitalized but survived. ^[1]

9 Hippo Attacks Toddler

When listing the most dangerous animals in the world, hippos probably aren’t the first creatures that come to mind. However, these huge animals kill approximately 500 people a year. In December of 2022, Iga Paul almost became one of these statistics.

Two-year-old Iga was playing outside his family home in Uganda when a hippo from nearby Lake Edward attacked. Initial reports claimed that the animal swallowed the child whole and then miraculously vomited him up when a neighbor began pelting it with rocks. However, officials later clarified that only Iga’s head and shoulders were in the hippo’s mouth. Either way, the boy is lucky to have made a full recovery since a hippo’s sharp teeth can grow to be 20 inches (51 centimeters) long, and their bite can equal 2,000 pounds (907 kilograms) of pressure^[2]

8 Giraffe Attacks Toddler and Mother

Nicole Panos of South Africa wasn’t as lucky as Iga Paul when she and her children were attacked by a giraffe in the Kuleni Game Park. The park bills itself as a luxury resort for people who want to “experience the abundance and diversity of wildlife” and says guests can explore a variety of trails while getting an up-close look at zebras, wildebeest, and giraffes. However, guests are prohibited from feeding the animals and are encouraged to keep a safe distance.

As an experienced guide at the park, Nicole would have been familiar with these rules but was also used to seeing the animals throughout the property. On October 20, 2022, she was taking her two children back to their cabin when they came across a herd of giraffes. The trio continued past the herd, and although giraffes are normally peaceful, one of them attacked the small family, severely injuring Nicole and tragically killing her 16-month-old daughter. Authorities reported no known reason for the attack but noted that several calves were in the herd and that female giraffes can be aggressive in defense of their young. ^[3]

7 Pet Kangaroo Attacks Owner

Peter Eades was a lifelong animal lover and Alpaca breeder in Australia who also has the sad distinction of being the first Australian killed by a kangaroo since 1936. And not just any kangaroo but one that he’d raised from a small joey. What he didn’t realize is that in 2022, his pet had just hit the turning point age for kangaroos, especially those in captivity. According to wildlife expert Michelle Jones, when a kangaroo is right around three, these cute pets tune into their wild animal instincts, and their behavior becomes unpredictable.

Although fatal attacks are rare, male kangaroos can be aggressive and see people in an upright position as threatening. No one is sure if that’s what provoked Eades’s pet; when a relative found him later in the day, he’d already been seriously injured by the angry kangaroo. Unfortunately for Eades, medical help was delayed even longer because the kangaroo wouldn’t let the paramedics near the man. Police eventually shot the creature, but it was too late for Eades, who succumbed to his injuries.^[4]

6 Python Swallows Woman Alive

People always say that snakes are “more afraid of you than you are of them.” But that’s hard to believe in the case of a 22-foot-long (6.7-meter) python capable of eating anything that crosses its path. And in October of 2022, a 54-year-old grandmother named Jahrah apparently crossed paths with the wrong snake at the wrong time.

According to her husband, Jahrah left home to go to work and never returned. He later found some of her belongings in the forest and organized a search party. The rescuers found the huge snake with a suspicious bulge in its stomach. Sure enough, once they killed the snake and cut it open, they found Jahrah’s body inside^[5]

5 Elephant Kills Woman and Attacks Her Funeral

One of the strangest stories of the year involved an elephant who not only killed a woman but then stormed into her funeral and attacked her corpse. In June, 70-year-old Maya Murmu was walking to a well in Odisha, India, when she encountered an Asian elephant that had escaped from a nearby animal sanctuary. The huge beast trampled Murmu and ran away. Murmu was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment but never recovered.

This is when the story takes an even odder turn. Murmu’s family was in the middle of her funeral ceremony when the elephant reappeared and charged toward the unlit pyre. It grabbed Murmu’s body, flung it in the air, and trampled it again before disappearing back into the brush^[6]

4 Alligator Drowns South Carolina Man

Alligator sightings are common in the southern U.S. states. In fact, there are approximately 100,000 of the giant reptiles living in South Carolina alone. Despite their fearsome appearance, alligator attacks are rare. When they do happen, it’s largely attributed to animals that have lost their natural fear of humans. For example, when humans feed alligators and condition them to think of people as a source of food. Or when the gator is surrounded by humans daily and has gotten accustomed to their presence, like on golf courses and in neighborhood ponds.

This seems to be the case in the death of Michael Burnstein in June of 2022. According to reports, Burstein was mowing the grass on the side of a pond at the Myrtle Beach Golf and Yacht Club community when an 11-foot (3.4-meter) alligator lunged from the water, grabbed him, and dragged him back below the surface. Burnstein was then held underwater until he drowned, and first responders were eventually able to retrieve his body.^[7]

3 Monkey Mob Kills a Baby

July featured one of the most horrifying attacks of the year when a group of rhesus macaque monkeys attacked a family in Uttar Pradesh, India, and threw the youngest child to its death. According to reports, on July 18, Nirdesh Upadhyay and his wife and infant son went out to relax on their third-floor terrace. While they were out enjoying the fresh air, some of the monkeys that roam the city climbed onto the roof.

Upadhyay tried to run back into the house but tripped and lost hold of his four-month-old son. With terrifying speed, one of the monkeys grabbed the baby and threw it off the roof. By the time his parents had fought their way through the monkeys and rushed downstairs, the boy had died.^[8]

2 Leopard Attacks 15 People

India was also the site of one of the last animal attacks of the year when a leopard injured 15 people on December 27, 2022. It started at the Rain Forest Research Institute campus on a Monday morning in Assam, India, when the huge cat began prowling around, searching for food. For the next 24 hours, the leopard ran rampant through the village, jumping onto vehicles and terrifying residents. The majority of people injured were forest officials, but a woman and two children were also wounded. Luckily, all the victims survived.^[9]

1 Bear Wrestles College Wrestlers

Animal attacks usually aren’t uplifting stories, but it’s nice to be able to round out the 2022 list with a story that also shows friendship, bravery, and incredible selflessness. Brady Lowry and Kendell Cummings, wrestlers at Northwest College in Cody, WY, went into the Shoshone National Forest on October 17 to hunt for dropped antlers but found a bear instead.

According to Lowry, the grizzly charged out of the trees and knocked him to the ground. Then it bit him, breaking his left arm in the process. That’s when Cummings jumped in to help, grabbing the bear’s ear and trying to pull the animal off Lowry. His attempts worked a little too well since the grizzly turned its attention to Cummings, knocking him down and biting him too. The wrestler fought back, bravely shoving his hands into the bear’s mouth so it couldn’t bite his neck.

The strategy worked at first, with the grizzly retreating, but then it returned to attack Cummings again, this time crunching down on his skull and face. Eventually, the pair was able to get away and get help. Although hospitalized with serious injuries, both young men survived. Because according to Lowry, the bond between the best friends meant neither would leave the other behind.^[10]