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Ravenous Squirrels Kill Dog
As improbable as this seems, here’s the story from the BBC:
Squirrels have bitten to death a stray dog which was barking at them in a Russian park, local media report.
Passers-by were reportedly too late to stop the attack by the black squirrels in a village in the far east, which reportedly lasted about a minute.
They are said to have scampered off at the sight of humans, some carrying pieces of flesh.
A pine cone shortage may have led the squirrels to seek other food sources, although scientists are sceptical.
The attack was reported in parkland in the centre of Lazo, a village in the Maritime Territory, and was witnessed by three local people.
A “big” stray dog was nosing about the trees and barking at squirrels hiding in branches overhead when a number of them suddenly descended and attacked, reports say.
“They literally gutted the dog,” local journalist Anastasia Trubitsina told Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper.
“When they saw the men, they scattered in different directions, taking pieces of their kill away with them.”
I couldn’t be more skeptical of this story, especially coming from Russia’s Pravda, which sometimes is only a step above the Weekly World News. But hey, who knows! Crazy things happen in the world. Killer squirrel packs might just be our next big national security threat.
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December 2nd, 2005 at 12:59 am
oh yeah I heard about that on sql. I was like yay for the squirrels. Now if we could only train the Iraqi military to be as vivacious.
December 2nd, 2005 at 2:48 am
LOL, if you want to see it terms of Iraq, the squirrels, IMO, are the “insurgents”, and the barking dog is the US. A big, stray dog stirring up trouble where it isn’t needed, and “barking up the wrong tree”. Iraq is the tree, and the Iraqi military are the branches without squirrels on them. If the dog had just left the squirrels alone, the squirrels and tree would have been able to live in peace by themselves. The lack of pine cones echo the poor conditions within Iraq.
You could take this metaphor as far as you want, but I’ll stop there and just smile at a silly story
.
LOL, squirrels are such curious creatures, they always seem to fascinate me.
December 2nd, 2005 at 3:06 am
well you have your opinion, and you are definitely entitled to it.
December 2nd, 2005 at 8:22 am
=o
December 2nd, 2005 at 10:44 am
[…] o death a stray dog which was barking at them in a Russian park, local media report. Those little monsters killed Benji. Deer are charging at people, causing in […]
December 2nd, 2005 at 11:10 am
hey, a snowball.
December 2nd, 2005 at 11:57 am
we have squirrels living in our attic and they are REALLY loud. they drive our dog crazy. now i’m glad she can’t get up there . . . .
December 2nd, 2005 at 12:49 pm
The physical capability is definitely there, squirrels are quite fast and quite strong for their size, while dogs are slow and (except for a few) flabby. A pack of squirrels could certainly kill a dog in an organized attack.
But I’m not sure about the mental/motivational aspects. Squirrels are not normally social animals, so organizing a pack would seem to be difficult. And while the dog would be doomed, he could probably take a few squirrels down with him. I’m sure that each squirrel has some idea of the danger.
December 2nd, 2005 at 1:21 pm
There’s a park in the middle of Minneapolis called Loring Park that has squirrels who are accustomed to being fed. One day I was walking through the park with a bag of chips when a squirrel started following me. And another. And another. Pretty soon I felt like the frickin’ Pied Piper. One of the squirrels was particularly bold and looked as if he might climb up my clothes to get at the chips. I stamped my foot at him and he didn’t even flinch.
Freakin’ squirrels.
December 2nd, 2005 at 2:06 pm
wait just a danged minute here: a *”pine cone shortage”*????
December 2nd, 2005 at 2:33 pm
Squirrels are awesome, regardless of the validity of the story. They’re so curious and eccentric. My nickname last year, due to a mistake, was squirrel, and I’ve embraced it ever since, even if it was a mistake.
Also, here’s something I stumbled across in a much larger, “stranger” article:
Interesting
December 2nd, 2005 at 8:23 pm
I’ve never heard of a “pack” of squirrels. Apparently they are evolving, like the velociraptors. Me thinks Speilberg needs to get with the program on this one.
December 2nd, 2005 at 9:35 pm
i debate whether a species could change it`s genetic makeup. certainly the cellur makeup of a species can be altered. the human athlete changes it`s cellular makeup by training in specific ways. a long distance runner or jogger has more slow-twitch muscle fibres in his legs to be able to do low intesity running for long periods. the sprinter, on the other hand has a greater amount of fast-twitch muscle fibre which is more suited to short, intense bursts of speed.
this in no way effects the dna of the athlete. these kind of changes are called mutations and are so unpredictable that any evident mutation tends to be destructive to the animal.
in the article about the squirrels, they could have been misidentified. sounds more like rat behaviour.
science has desperately searched for mutations at the dna level that have been successful to a species survival. it would mean trillions of dollars in new funding for all manner of research and experimentation. no missing link has ever been found. period. tea-stained jawbones included.
final note from me about squirrels. my friend`s mother used to carry one around in the pocket of her apron. she used to feed it nuts and it would come like a dog when called. i had a friend who had a baby racoon. dear, sweet little thing that used to purr when petted, until it bit my friend for several sticthes on day when he played to roughly for it. he put the little guy back in the woods.
nature is beautiful and deadly, all at the same time. so are we. we are natural too, though it comes as a surprise to some.
December 2nd, 2005 at 10:50 pm
Quite true
December 3rd, 2005 at 9:49 am
ktulu, we are all part of the same thing, so everything is happening to everyone, now. we can only focus on one aspect at a time, so our choice as to what to focus on becomes our reality as an individual. imagine if everyone focused on the same thing at the same time?
December 3rd, 2005 at 1:28 pm
Well, things would certainly get accomplished a lot quicker, but i think that may also cause important things to be neglected. I’ve thought about those things, and I think the only way it would be of some good, would be if people (imagine an irregular geometric figure) looked inward towards what’s in the center, and slowly collapsed society down to a single point (the single focus). Then, after everyone was there (like all the atoms in a blackhole), the point burst, and everyone had a single goal (geometric figure - preferably the circle) in mind, and thus EXPANDED within a single structure.
That might be successful
December 5th, 2005 at 1:06 am
i didn`t mean forever………..i meant that if we developed a clear cultural purpose of single-mindedness toward something basic like BEING NICE TO EACHOTHER and let that be the ground for a new media of community then we could just let it run like a sub-program in a folder named nice, or smiles, so that we could find the fucking thing if we crash and have to reinstall the operating system for some reason.
tired…..must sleep.
December 29th, 2005 at 5:11 pm
[…] o death a stray dog which was barking at them in a Russian park, local media report. Those little monsters killed Benji. Deer are charging at people, causing inju […]