Re: Painful encounters with animals
No major injuries from animals for me.
A few ant bites, a couple of spider bites, wasp stings and a bee sting. I had a mild reaction to the spider bite where the skin became red and inflamed around the immediate area for a few days.
My Lovely Cousin is terrified of the things, so I went to evict it but couldn't get the window open because the handle worked the opposite way to my hand. The thing bit me on my thumb, then when I put it in my other hand so I could open the window, the thing bit me again.
I still have a scar on my abdomen from a wasp sting where a friend of mine thought it would be a good idea to poke a stick into a wasps' nest. Two of the soldiers chased me across a field for about a hundred metres before one of them managed to get under my shirt and jab me.
I got clocked by a horse when it swung its head and hit mine, knocking me over and bending my glasses.
I nearly got my arm broken whilst trying to persuade a cow to get into a cattle wagon. Luckily I escaped with mild bruising.
Then there was Patch, my Lovely Cousin's white boxer dog, so named because he had a brown patch around one eye.
She got him when she was eleven and he was a cute ball of fluff. By the time she was fourteen, he was huge and far too big and strong for her to walk on a lead, so that job fell to my Uncle, or occasionally me when I visited.
Patch weighed 60 kilos, almost as heavy as I was at the time, and immensely strong.
I called in to see the family one weekend and my Aunt offered me a cup of hot chocolate. I was sitting on the settee when Patch decided to come and "say hello", knocking my mug over and spilling the hot liquid in my lap.
It was extremely painful, and made more so by my embarrassment whilst I desperately tried not to grab my crotch or strip off in front of two teenage girls.
Worst of all, it completely ruined my ... best white corduroy flares!
A few years later I went camping with my Uncle and his family, pitching my tent next to their caravan.
I was walking across a field with my Uncle who had his Father-in-Law's dog on a lead, when Patch escaped from the caravan via a small kitchen window after jumping up onto the worktop and sink.
My Aunt screamed a warning as 60kg of white fury barrelled across the grass towards this other dog who had stolen his dad.
I met Patch head on and rugby tackled him to the ground, then hung on as he snarled and snapped and wriggled until my Aunt ran up and managed to get a lead on him.
I was battered and bruised, with sore ribs and a sore head where his breeze block of a head had hit me a glancing blow.
Luckily nothing was broken, but I did ruin yet another pair of trouserings as a result.
Patch was absolutely devoted to my Uncle, and it would have been unfair to separate them, so we decided the best thing to do was to leave "her" dog with her Dad when my Lovely Cousin and I got married.