I am eagerly awaiting what I know to be my destiny: the opportunity to strangle a rabid animal to death with my bare hands in order to save my family.
Here’s the deal, according to my favorite People.com vertical, People Pets: DeDe Phillips, a 46 year old grandmother living in Hart County, Georgia, wandered out of her house with her cell phone in hand to investigate why her neighbor’s dog was barking. Turns out, there was a bobcat out and about; Hart took a picture and then, in her words, “the cat took two steps and was on top of me … It came for my face.”
I have to assume that most other people would succumb to the bobcat’s forceful ministrations, content to die at the paws’n’claws of a beast, but Hart wasn’t trying to go out like that. “I thought, ‘Not today.’ There was no way I was going to die,” she told the Athens Banner-Herald. And you know what, my friends? She didn’t!!
From People:
She knew the large feline would go for her upper body, so she protected herself by squeezing on its throat. After a frightening battle that resulted in a broken finger, many bites and claw wounds to her face, hands, arms, chest and legs, Phillips finally managed to strangle the cat. She didn’t call for help because her 5-year-old granddaughter was in the house [and she didn’t want her to come outside].
Eventually, Phillips’s daughter-in-law called 911 and her son also showed up to stab the cat “multiple times before his mother would release the animal’s lifeless body.”
This is the kind of shit I want to think about doing instead of being frightened or nervous around big animals like horses (the teeth!) and small animals like mice (too skittery). What animal will I strangle with my bare hands in order to protect my kin? Will I be ready when a rabid capybara ambles out of the brush with its red eyes narrowed on my children? I must start my training now. I will gather my weapons from the soft carpet of the forest floor. I will lie in wait. I will be ready.