So I’m sitting here watching Animal Planet, some survivors attack stories and I have to say I don’t have sympathy for some of these people. There is the fellow in Florida who went swimming in the pond behind his house. Why is this silly you ask? Because he was attacked by a gator! In Florida! I’m not surprised by this. You couldn’t pay me enough money to swim in a pond in Florida. If a baby were drowning I might just say so long kid. There are gators everywhere in Florida; who goes swimming there?

And then there is the surfer in South Africa who was attacked by not one, but two great white sharks simultaneously. Where was he surfing? Not in Michigan where there are no sharks, not even in, oh, Ireland where there aren’t any sharks, but off a known reef where great whites hang out and feed constantly. Where seven surfers have died from shark attacks already. I have a hard time finding sympathy for this fellow who felt surfing here was a good idea. Who still surfs there.

Sometimes I stand at the lip of a volcano and look over at the liquid, hot, magma and decide it is not a good idea to go swimming. I feel good about that decision. So I have to ask myself, why do other people seem so immune to good sense?

Luckily for the surfer, two sharks attacked him at the same time and this perhaps saved his life. Now that qualifies as irony. I am flabbergasted by the people on the Animal Planet. Flabbergasted!

I’ll tell you who I have sympathy for. I feel bad for the man who was mauled by a hippo. That guy was just kayaking in Africa and some feisty hippo took offense. I feel bad for that guy. There’s no accounting for a hippo’s temperament. And when was the last time anyone was hunted by a hippo? No one expects that. He didn’t deserve to be shown up by a hippo.

My roommate just brought up an interesting scenario, though. Crocodile versus the Great White. I’m feeling that the croc has a significant advantage over the shark myself—the shark only has the one set of teeth and they’re really disadvantaged by the oversized nose. The croc on the other hand can just take bites out of the shark and have at it. Now, it should be remembered that the shark is feisty and won’t go down easy. It is entirely possible the shark would just toss the croc up in the air and start taking bites out of the underbelly. We’ll have to conceive of that showdown in more detail later.

Last I leave you with this thought. The odds might be in your favor, animals might only attack 1 out of every 100 people, but it doesn’t matter if you are the 1. And if you see the shark giving you the eye and decide to go swim with it anyway, I feel no sorrow for you when it takes a nibble that just happens to be your arm.