STUPID should hurt
stupid SHOULD hurt
stupid should HURT
I visited Old Faithful ten years or so ago to find that the walkways around the geysers had been closed. A buffalo had attacked a woman walking the trail with her husband. She wasn’t’t particularly close to the buffalo, but she was a lot closer than the family group whose parents were allowing their idiot boy to pelt the buffalo with rocks.
The lesson is: You don’t even have to be the idiot to get in trouble with wild beasts.
The woman suffered only minor injuries, a ranger told me when they reopened the walkways, but the brat could easily have gotten her killed.
Many people approach the lone isolated laying down buffalo to have it in the background of a selfie. These are usually males that have been chased from the herd by the dominant male. Unfortunately, during rutting season they can be very aggressive.
Sounds like she has a great pic for her facebook. When we were there the Japanese were always running to get these pics and one guy was following a Grizzly bear and had to be stopped by a Ranger.
Pray America is waking
I don’t know if this is cultural, genetic, or what ... but I can’t even tell you how many Asian visitors I’ve seen in national parks in the U.S. and Canada interacting like this with dangerous wild animals. Every time I drive past a scene on the side of a road out west with a bunch of Chinese or Japanese tourists trying to pose with an elk or bison for a photo, I cringe to myself and wonder if someone could buy these idiots a clue.
To my surprise and shock, a group of idiot tourists that I had not seen when I first started photographing the elk kept going closer and closer. I told them that these were not tame animals. That the herd bull over yonder could drive those sharp antlers right through you, powered by something around 1,000 pounds of weight behind it, and that they could run much faster than we could. I repeated myself and told them to back off. Suddenly, I heard this deep sonorous voice behind me say, "Thank you. You may have saved a life here." I looked UP (quite a ways) to find a towering park ranger (they all seem to be!) smiling down on me.
So I can well believe this stupid girl, who obviously had not done her homework, would pull a foolish act like this.
Another brainless babe who will be able to vote in less than two years.
I was surrounded by a herd of 100 bison moving past me in Yellowstone’s Bison Ford area. Stood behind a tree as they passed within three feet with nothing but a graphite fly rod in my hand.
Growing up in Montana we had a name for this kind of stupid people, we called them -
TOURONS
a cross between a tourist and a moron
I keep hearing that Yellowstone is incredible, and I’m sure that’s true- but sharing it with hordes of idiots would kill the whole experience for me. I used to live in some really beautiful very wild country in extreme northern California, and the lack of roving packs of imbeciles was a good part of the appeal.
I grew up there. There weren’t any warning signs in eighteen different languages posted anywhere. It didn’t have to be explained to me that wild animals deserve a healthy dose of respect and are not to be approached or petted. It was kind of a common-sense thing, like not sitting down to lunch in the middle of the highway.