There are three guarantees in life: Death, taxes, and tourists getting too close to animals at Yellowstone National Park.
What is it about bison that makes people feel as though the big beasts are approachable? It’s certainly not the sharp horns on the top of their heads, or the fact that they weigh upwards of 2,000 pounds.
Many argue that people disregard the “keep 25 yards away” guidance from the National Park Service because the bison looks like large, fluffy cows. So does that mean that people are wondering right up to random cows as well?
Large animals are naturally built with power, and an innate need to protect themselves. Those two things together should be enough to keep people away from them (even the more docile animals), yet we see videos like this one below all the damn time.
In this footage, a bison comes wondering onto a walkway at Yellowstone National Park with a good amount of people traversing it. The individuals that are near the wild animal are downplaying the seriousness of the situation, laughing and saying “oh no” as it gets closer and closer.
That behavior takes the guard down, and ends up causing a small gathering of people standing just off the path to put themselves in harms way. The laughs and sarcastic “oh’s” quickly turn to panic when the massive beast puts its head down and charges at a small group.
Some of them run away, but there’s one man that appears to not be agile enough to dodge the bison. He gets backed up against a wooden fence, and as he tries to slowly shimmy over it, the bison runs at him and uses its head and horns to flip the man backwards, up and over the fence.
The cameraman who had been letting out all of the playful “oh’s” suddenly changes his tone when he rushes to the man that just a tumble and asks:
“Oh no, are you okay?”
That’s going to leave a mark…
As you can hear in the video, after the man was flipped over the wooden fencing, he hit his head on the sidewalk, and started to bleed. Though any head injury is serious, he (along with everyone else that was there) is very fortunate that the bison didn’t do more damage.
There definitely were not any sympathizers in the comment section of the Instagram post:
“Is it wrong to root for the animals? Asking for a friend.”
“And that’s when he realized that the world isn’t a petting zoo.”
“‘Are you ok?!’ Um, no, I just got trucked over a wooden beam by a 2,000 pound prehistoric beast directly on to my dome.”
“Don’t pet the fluffy cows!”
“What the hell did they expect?”
