Australian animals
Living in Australia, you are liable to be attacked by anything and everything, anywhere. However, this is not about being attacked, but rather avoiding it by the merest fraction:

- I rode over a red-bellied black snake crossing the bush track in front of me on a bike. Since I was going too fast to stop in time I decided to go faster... my brother behind me screamed like a little girl and decided he wasn't going to try the same experiment and let it continue on its way (it takes a fair bit more than a bike to break a snake's back). The red-bellied black is relatively harmless but to this day I am not so sure if it was really that or a brown snake...

- I walked bare-footed and in shorts down through the paddock and stepped right next to a coiled up black snake sunning itself. He obviously had better things to do than attack and I kept walking, this time however with a very stiff gait reminiscent of a robot.

- This time I was sunning myself on the patio and according to eye-witness accounts (though I was completely unaware at the time) a tiger snake slithered under my low easy-chair, popped out the other side, and continued merrily on his way...

- I woke up one night feeling very uncomfortable about what felt like a big hairy spider walking over my face. By the time I decided to investigate and turned on the bed lamp it was gone.

- Walking into the chook shed one fine sunny morning a snake popped down off the roof in front of me and went out. I was very careful about checking the roof before blithely walking in next time, I assure you...

- I've also been stung by jellyfish and bitten by inch-men (one-inch long super-nasty bull-ants with chrome bodies)

- Running along the beach at low tide among the rock pools I narrowly missed stepping on a magnificently huge spiny sea star. I am unsure that if my foot were punctured in thousands of places I would also be poisoned...
www.faunanet.gov.au/wos/factfile.cfm?Fact_ID=119

Considering that all these stories concern snakes, let me alert you to all the other nasties and stories I've heard:

- A friend of ours was chased by a wild boar
- Farmers have found sheep gored and dead in their lower paddocks, assumed to be done by a panther
- Kangaroos if cornered will rear up on their legs and disembowel you - someone apparently at a picnic up north went up to one which laid his guts on the ground...
(satellite blows, Sat 26 Apr 2008, 5:33, Reply)