Posted on 07/03/2018 6:32:28 AM PDT by from occupied ga
A woman was yanked from a boat when a shark she was hand-feeding bit into her finger and hauled her into waters off the northwestern coast of Australia.
Melissa Brunning was standing on the stern of a yacht, feeding fish to a group of tawny nurse sharks, when one sank its teeth into her finger and dragged her overboard.
Mobile phone video footage of the incident shows her screaming as she fell into the water.
“It happened so quickly. All I could really focus on was the fact that my finger is gone. He’d clamped on it and it felt like it was shredding off the bone,” she said.
The attack occurred while the 34-year-old woman from Perth was on holiday in Dugong Bay, a remote spot known for its sharks and saltwater crocodiles.
Tawny sharks are normally placid creatures, but will bite defensively if they feel threatened. In this case, the attacker’s multiple rows of shark teeth and powerful jaws were strong enough to fracture Brunning’s bone.
Although she was quickly pulled back on board by her companions, Brunning initially thought that she’d lost her finger in the attack.
“I came up and I said I’ve lost my finger and I couldn’t even look at my finger because I thought it was gone, and I thought if I looked at it I’d probably go into shock.”
Her finger survived and Brunning emerged from the incident relatively unharmed.
She said she was wrong to attempt to feed the sharks and cautioned others against doing the same.
“Just be mindful of your surroundings and don’t feed sharks.”
video at link
The current installment of ‘Stupid People Doing Stupid Things’.
If you want to feed the wildlife it is ok to ‘toss’ the food to them folks.
Animals are not hung up on etiquette, they won’t mind.
I’ve said many times that the greatest threat to wildlife is ignorance on the part of the public. Witness the story yesterday about the “black” (melanistic) giraffe and some of the idiotic comments about them being “docile”, “endangered”, etc.
The same thing applies to nurse sharks. There’s a broad perception of them being tame and harmless, which is far removed from the truth.
In another article, she admits she was essentially just being blonde - and that is what blonds do.
Stupid games. Stupid prizes.
He-he-he-he-he. A painfully learned lesson by this foolish lady!!
Play stupid games.
Nurse shark teeth:
You'd get bit worse by not minding your fingers while feeding a carrot to a horse.
Feeding alligators is also a stupid act.
Yes, and “no good deed goes unpunished.”
Thus, the open palm method. Kinda like tucking your fingers when using a chef's knife, all methods to keep fingers attached.
This is not a good practice as it gives people too much of a comfort zone around animals which leads to incidents such as this.
This is not the fault of the animals. When they attack humans, they are only acting on their instinctual impulses to defend themselves. Even your own domesticated dog will bite you if they feel threatened. People should be intelligent enough to give all wild animals a respectful distance.
Yeah, but the ignorant general public can’t distinguish between a Nurse shark and a great white, thus the journalistic sensationalism.
Many people think "Bambi" is a nature documentary. They really ought to see "The Ghost and the Darkness" for an antidote to this silly sort of thinking.
Terry Goodkind in "Wizards' First Rule."
60+ million in the USA couldn’t distinguish between Donald Trump an hones businessman, and Hillary Clinton, a corrupt crooked socialist (is there any other kind of socialist?) and voted for her. Lots of stupidity out there.
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