A tale as old as time.
Well, it’s at least as old as when selfies first became a thing. Depending on where you look, some say the selfie has been around since the 1800s, while others date it back to around the 1990s and early 2000s. Regardless, at some point people started wanting to take selfies with wild animals, and it has never really gone well.
If you are looking for some examples of ill-fated selfie snapping, look no further than this big bison running off a camera-wielding tourist, or this woman who tried to line up a picture with a goat. Every video starts out the same, and sure enough, every clip usually ends with the person regretting that they tried to take a selfie.
Which brings us to this older video out of Yellowstone National Park. Back in 2016, one woman gave the world a video that is basically the textbook definition of “pressing your luck.” She first walks up to a bison minding its own business standing by some trees and snaps a photo of the behemoth.
Going by National Park Service guidelines, she’s still far too close to the wild animal (she should have stayed 25 yards away). However, she managed to take the picture and safely walked off. So no harm no foul, right?
Well, she ends up returning to the bison a couple of moments later, and that proved to be her second worst decision of the day. What was her worst? Turning her back to the bison to set up for a selfie, and then likely finding out through her screen that the 2,000 pound animal was charging right at her.
Amazingly, as soon as the bison hit top speed, the woman did too as she fled to safety. And she proved that the classic horror movie trope of falling down while fleeing danger could be based on real life, because she ate it shortly after she started running away.
You would have thought that after she fell down, she would have tried even harder to put distance between herself and the bison. But she didn’t do that. What she ended up doing once she got back up was shocking (and incredibly stupid), and I’ll let you take a look at it yourself in the video below:
