- WHAT A CHOKER...
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- In Azerbaijan, an 11 year old girl called Matanet fell
asleep in a field after picking tomatoes and woke up choking. She was rushed
to a children's hospital in Baku and made to drink 3.5 pints of salt solution,
after which she vomited up a two foot long Caucasian cat snake, which had
crawled into her mouth while she slept. She left hospital an hour later
feeling fine.
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- HAZARDS OF XMAS PUDDING
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- Marie Hefferman was 13 when she celebrated her first
Christmas in Australia after her family emigrated from England. Unknowingly,
she swallowed a 1959 silver threepenny piece which her mother had put in
the Christmas pudding. She developed laryngitis and lost her voice six
weeks afterwards. Twelve years later, still unspeaking, she had a coughing
fit and brought up a little black lump which contained the coin. It had
been lodged sideways in her throat and missed by the X- ray machine, but
after speech therapy she was able to talk again - and had acquired a broad
Australian accent in her years of silence.
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- SNAKE SNACKS
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- Wang Biao, a young peasant from north-east China, ate
more than 1,800 live poisonous snakes over two years, to cure himself of
convulsions. The cure was effective, but by then Wang had become addicted
to snakes and needed to swallow one before every meal.
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- RUBBER FOR SUPPER
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- Chinese health authorities have discovered a woman in
her 30s in Taiyuan, Shanxi province, who likes rubber so much that she
has eaten 800 rubber nipples from baby-feeding bottles since 1990. All
her family like the smell of rubber, and her younger brother is fond of
eating rubber bands!
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- SNAKES ALIVE!
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- During the making of the Turkish film Suicide Commando,
tough-guy actor Sonmez Yikilmaz slept in a tent with the film crew. One
night a black snake crawled into the tent and into Sonmez through his open
mouth. An X-ray proved that the snake was alive in his stomach, but he
refused an operation to remove it. Instead, he tried out an ancient method
of snake removal. He was hung upside down from a tree with a pot of steaming
milk on the ground below him. The smell of the hot milk lured the snake
out.
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- More Short Stories From The Fortean Times
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- http://www.forteantimes.com/artic/cabnet/animal.html
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- BEAR-FACED CHEEK
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- At an airstrip on Alaska's Barter Island, teams of polar
bears have taken to walking in a dead straight line to the runway's landing
lights, and then bashing them until they go out. Naturalists are mystified.
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- REVENGE OF THE MOUSE
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- In China's Jiangsu province, farmer Xu Guihuai found
he had unwelcome tenants: a female mouse and her three babies. He set traps
and poison, and the three offspring were soon killed. The mother vanished,
though, and then mounted a campaign of vengeance against Xu. She attacked
him in his sleep, and one morning he woke to find his hand had been gnawed.
Another night she bit his ear so seriously that he had to go to a local
clinic for help. At last report, the 10-ounce mouse was still wreaking
havoc in Xu's household.
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- BATS IN THE BELFRY
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- Turkish seaman Rafit Belir jumped ship in 1991, hoping
to start a new life as an illegal immigrant in Australia. He was walking
along a road in north Queensland when he saw a cloud of flying bats darkening
the sky. Convinced that they were vampire bats craving his blood, he turned
himself in and asked to be flown back to Turkey. After he was gone, officials
revealed that the 'winged horrors' were nothing but harmless fruit bats.
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- FISH-FACE
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- Carmen Malavasi crashed her moped into a passing car
as she rode through Suzzara in Italy. She lost control when a giant carp
leapt out of a nearby canal and smacked her in the face. Having survived
the crash, she ate the carp for supper.
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- RATS RUN RIOT
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- A couple in Oslo, Norway, bred rats at home to sell to
a pet shop. When the shop went bankrupt, they decided to keep 15 rats.
Before long, more than 1,000 rats were roaming the house, forcing the couple
to abandon the bedroom and sleep on a mattress in the living room. Then
the rats captured the living room and the couple fled. The rats were eventually
gassed to death, and a rather wiser couple reclaimed their home.
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- POTTY POTOROOS
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- The rabbit-sized Tasmanian potoroo is an 'at risk' species,
and attempts to breed them in captivity have run up against unexpected
problems: if unsupervised males are left together, they have a tendency
to tear off each other's genitals.
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- WOODEN ACTING
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- People were worried that an owl perched on a pylon at
Johnstown, near Wrexham, never flew away, so someone called the RSPCA.
An official spent an hour trying to coax the bird down before a neighbour
told him: "You're wasting your time. It's made of wood." The
local electricity company had installed it as a decoy to discourage nest-
building.
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- ELEPHANT'S REVENGE
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- In February 1993 a train knocked down and injured an
elephant calf in the Sylhet region of Bangladesh. When the next train came
along an hour later the calf's mother blocked the track, then banged her
forehead against the engine for 15 minutes, until it could no longer run.
Then she walked off into the jungle again, leaving about 200 passengers
stranded for over five hours.
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- MAN'S BEST FRIEND
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- Jack Fyfe, 75, was paralysed by a stroke at his home
in Sydney, Australia, in December 1991. He was kept alive for nine days
by Trixie, his pet sheepdog, who kept soaking a towel in her drinking bowl
and draping it over her owner's face so that he could suck it. Trixie remained
at the foot of the bed the whole time, except to wet the towel whenever
Mr. Fyfe called "water". When the bowl was dry, Trixie took water
from the lavatory. Mr. Fyfe's daughter eventually found him when he failed
to turn up for a family dinner; by then he had lost four stone in weight
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- DOLPHINS TO THE RESCUE
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- Francois Colombier was out in a 10 foot rubber dinghy
with his son and a friend when they were caught in a violent storm off
Brittany in October 1993. Low on fuel and with the outboard motor spluttering,
they were tossed about by 10 foot waves, until four dolphins appeared.
Two took up positions at the stern and one on either side. Then they nudged
against the boat and guided it away from nearby rocks. Half an hour later,
the dolphins had brought the boat safely to shore, and swam off to sea
again.
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- SNAKE WARS
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- In October 1993, thousands of snakes, including cobras
and king cobras, were seen fighting in a snake sanctuary at Chiang Mai
in Thailand. The air was filled with the stench from the decomposing bodies
of the losers, but many fights ended inconclusively, with exhausted rivals
abandoning the fray. The fighting was seen as a bad omen. A Buddhist abbot
told journalists that in ancient times such an event foretold imminent
invasion.
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- HAIR RAISING
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- A falcon swooped on an elderly visitor to the Milky Way
Falconry in North Devon, grabbed his toupee and carried off the furry object
to its perch to eat it. The falconer quickly retrieved the toupee, but
by then it had become unwearable.
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- KEEP ROLLING ALONG...
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- In May 1992, an Indian elephant-keeper called Mr. Sreedharam
was trapped for 42 hours on the back of his elephant, which was in heat,
and ran amok for 200 miles through Kerala and Karnataka. It was eventually
tranquillised and he was rescued. He'd managed to eat by snatching fruit
that had been tied to trees for him along the animal's route.
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- MAN'S BEST FRIEND
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- 60 year old Jesus Martinez had a heart attack at the
wheel of his car on a motorway in Houston, Texas. His Schnauzer dog, Bitsy,
leapt into the driving seat, knocked the steering wheel to force the vehicle
onto the hard shoulder, and bit his master so that he would take his foot
off the accelerator. His prompt action saved the day, and Martinez recovered
in hospital.
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- FALLING OUT OF THE SKY
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- In October 1992, hundreds of birds, of 16 different species,
plummetted to the ground at Campeche, on the Yucatan coast of Mexico. They
were migrating from Canada and the USA to winter feeding grounds in South
America, and there was no apparent explanation. More than 200 fell on a
single ranch, and all had died from head injuries when they hit the ground.
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- PLAYING THE GOAT
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- Miss Adele Brown and her mother, of St. Anne's Bay, Jamaica,
met a talking goat while they were out collecting fruit during an election
campaign in 1992. The goat prophecied that unless the Green Party of Jamaica
came to power very soon the destruction of the planet would accelerate.
They asked the goat what they should do and it said: "There are no
limits to creativity and no limits to subversion. Vote for any candidate
opposed to the Year 2000 Party." Then it wandered off into the trees.
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- GOING APE
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- A French tourist was strolling with his wife in the orangutan
sanctuary at Sandakan, Borneo in 1992 when Raja, a 14 year old male orangutan,
grabbed him and stripped him naked. The tourist kept still for fear of
being injured, and Raja fled into the forest with trousers, shirt and underwear.
The tourist, in turn, fled to the park office where someone lent him a
pair of trousers.
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- GONE TO THE DOGS
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- In a bizarre but humane way of dealing with animal pests,
a Colorado entrepreneur, who says the idea came to him in a dream, has
invented a machine which vacuums prairie dogs from their burrows and deposits
them, unharmed "but somewhat confused", in a truck for relocation.
His business, appropriately called Dog-Gone, is booming.
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- FRESH FISH
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- Mehdi Qassemi bought a carp from a shop in Hamedan, Iran,
and put it in his freezer. A week later he took it out and started to thaw
it by pouring hot water over it...then watched in amazement as it leapt
back to life.
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- A RUM DO
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- In recent years, elephants have regularly made off with
scores of bottles of rum from a military supply base in the jungle area
of Bagdogra, northern Bengal. The elephants have learned to douse fires
lit to scare them away, and manage to short-circuit electrified fences
with uprooted trees. Once inside the depot, the huge raiders make short
work of thin steel railings and wooden window-frames, then help themselves
to the rum, sugar, flour and bananas inside.
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- The elephants break the bottles by curling their trunks
around them and smashing off the necks. After that they sway around enjoying
themselves before returning to the jungle. Soldiers who attempt to resist
regret it later. One elephant never forgot the man who poured hot water
on him one night, and returned regularly to demolish his hut.
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- BEAR-FACED CHEEK
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- A bear was bought from a Russian circus by a tourist
agent after he was asked to provide an American visitor with a "wild
bear hunt". The tourist was taken to the Perdelkino Forest near Moscow
and when all was ready, the bear was released. As the hunter closed in
on his prey, a postman passed by on his bike, saw the bear, and tumbled
off in surprise. Recalling his Big Top training, the bear grabbed the bike
and pedalled off, leaving the American to sue for fraud.
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- VAMPIRE ANTS
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- In March 1993, the town of Envira in the Amazon jungle
was invaded by vast swarms of giant blood- drinking ants. The 10,000 residents
were permanently forced to wear plastic bags round their ankles, and fought
back with poison and boiling water, but to no avail. Seeking meat, salt
and blood, the ants devoured cats, chickens and turtles, leaving nothing
but the bones behind. Children were at risk, and people who died were buried
40 miles away, as the local graveyard was no longer safe. The ants appeared
after local jungle was cleared, eliminating their natural predators, such
as birds and spiders, and within a few weeks they'd conquered 70% of the
town, with ant-hills every four yards.
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- WHAT A BOUNDER
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- Assuming that the kangaroo he had knocked over on the
road from Perth to Adelaide was dead, Emilio Tarra dressed it in his Gucci
blazer and was about to take its photograph when the animal recovered,
knocked him out with a blow from its tail and vanished into the bush with
his passport, $2000 and 16 credit cards.
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- FISHY YARN
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- A fisherman's dog disappeared while swimming across the
Pechora river in northern Siberia. Moments later the fisherman cast his
net and hauled in a massive pike, nearly six feet long, with a tail sticking
out of its mouth. He cut it open and his dog struggled out, barking and
none the worse for its experience.
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- HORSE SENSE
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- A horse bolted and galloped through Fakenham, Norfolk.
It finally stopped running at a pub called The Rampant Horse.
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- MONKEY BUSINESS
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- A man driving to work through the southern desert of
Saudi Arabia ran over one of a troop of monkeys. When he made the return
trip later that day, the remaining monkeys were waiting for him. They spotted
his car, jumped on it, and smashed the windows with their fists.
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- CAT NEST
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- A tortoiseshell cat, owned by Pamela Fletcher of Bradwell,
Derbyshire, climbed a 15 foot tree to give birth to three kittens in an
abandoned magpie's nest.
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