23/11/2009

An Australian man was in a stable condition in hospital after being slashed across the abdomen and face by a kangaroo that was holding his dog underwater.

An Australian man was in a stable condition in hospital after being slashed across the abdomen and face by a kangaroo that was holding his dog underwater.

Chris Rickard, 49, said he was walking his blue heeler, Rocky, on Sunday morning when they surprised a sleeping kangaroo in Arthur’s Creek north-east of Melbourne. The dog chased the animal into a pond but it then turned and pinned the pet underwater.

When Mr Rickard tried to pull his dog free, the kangaroo turned on him, attacking with its hind legs and tearing a deep cut into his abdomen and across his face.

“I thought I might take a hit or two dragging the dog out from under his grip, but I didn’t expect him to really attack me,” Mr Rickard told The Herald Sun newspaper. “It was a shock at the start because it was a kangaroo, about five feet high, they don’t go around killing people.”

Kangaroos rarely attack humans but will fight if they feel threatened.

Dogs often chase kangaroos, which have been known to lead the pets into water and then pin them underwater as a means of defence.

Mr Rickard said he finished the attack by elbowing the kangaroo in the throat, adding Rocky was “half-drowned” when he pulled him from the water.

http://news.uk.msn.com/world/articles.aspx?cp-documentid=151016816

(Submitted by Lindsay Selby)

Thanks to original news source

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Weird Happenings

by Victoria Rife

My husband’s grandparents live in a house they believe is haunted. Everyone in the family has experienced one thing or another and they have plenty of tales to share. I will tell a few of their personal tales in order to share my own.

My grandma-in-law was woken up in the morning by my grandpa-in-law. Her back was to him but she felt him roll out of bed, get up, and heard him walk into the bathroom. She tried unsuccessfully to go back to sleep and eventually got up to go into the bathroom herself, wondering what was taking her husband so long. But when she got in there he was nowhere to be seen. Confused, she called him and he proceeded to tell her that he had left very, very early that morning and hadn’t been in the house for a few hours. No one else was in the home.

My aunt-in-law was in her closet sorting clothes with her back to the doorway and her front facing the back of the closet. She saw the shadow of someone standing in the closet doorway so she turned around to see who it was but there was no one around.

My uncle-in-law was in the living room watching tv when a picture flew off the wall and crashed to the floor. I tried to question him if it simply fell but he was very adamant that it flew off the wall.

My mother-in-law and father-in-law were spending the night in the house when my husband was a baby – they were the only ones in the house that night. My mother-in-law chose to go to bed with the baby but she kept waking up to the sound of my father-in-law pacing the hallway. Worried that he would wake the baby, she got up and told him to stop but found him in the living room watching tv. He said he had been sitting there the whole time and never went into the hallway.

My husband and I stopped by to see his grandparents but they weren’t home. We didn’t want to stop by unannounced so we went inside to leave them a note. When we got in the dogs greeted us at the door and they were friendly. As we started to write the note though one of them became seriously agitated. Their dog, Hank, started to bark savagely and it wasn’t a “hey, get out of my house” or “there’s a squirrel!” bark, it was more of a threatening “I’m going to kill you” bark. This dog knows us very well so it’s not like we were strangers coming into his house threatening his domain. My husband tried to cool him down but he continued to bark and growl as if he were plain mad. But I noticed he wasn’t even looking at us – he was looking behind and beyond us. I told my husband, “look at Hank. He’s not barking at us. He’s barking at something else.”

It was extremely eerie and it made my hair stand up because this dog saw something we did not. At that moment the tv switched on and we got the hell out of there.

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