Even More Florida Oddities 10/30/2020

 

        Living in Florida has certain advantages. One of them is the relative certainty that, on any given day, someone, somewhere in the state will do something so stupid that it will even distract us albeit briefly, from the lunacy of the Trump shitshow. By the way, is "shitshow" one word, hyphenated or two words? 

        Today’s paper has an article relating one such phenomenon. The headline reads “Leopard mauls man who paid for pictures.”  You just can’t “not read” what follows can you? It actually looks much like the title of a Carl Hiaasen or Dave Barry novel, or perhaps, an episode of the reprehensible "Tiger King".

        It seems some moron in South Florida, Davie to be precise, enabled and abetted by an equally moronic state licensure system which allowed a “backyard zoo" and  granted an “exotic and endangered species license,” ran said “zoo” in his backyard. Okay, I know, so he’s an animal lover. Yeah, but not in town in the back yard. To make it into the “Florida Oddities” item of the daily state and local news required him to take it to the next level.

        Accordingly, he offered, for $150 (cash only, thanks) an opportunity for a “full contact experience” with a black leopard. (not a “panther”, there ain’t no such critter). A black “panther” is simply a leopard or, even more dangerous and larger, jaguar, whose spots are obscured by a condition, melanism, which causes the black appearance. Full contact included “playing with and posing for photos" with the cat in question. You know, if you have even limited experience with Felis Domesticus, that they will sometimes act a bit squirrelly when “playing.”  With a house cat this is annoying. With a leopard,…well, that’s what this is about.

        Apparently as soon as the hapless patron was admitted to the enclosure, the leopard, perhaps just having a bad day, immediately attacked him, without so much as an introductory  paw shake, culminating, when the cat was finally driven off, with the man’s scalp torn so badly that police described it as “hanging from his head, and his ear was torn in half.”

        While the article mentions criminal charges (and license revocation) for the proprietor, it omits critical details such as “did the dude get his money back?”

 

        In a similar, but fortunately less harmful, incident, one Marcia Temple of Georgia (which is explanatory in and of itself) was asked to leave Disney’s Magic Kingdom because, while inside the park, she asked her six year old son to watch her purse and the Glock 9mm within while she tried to call her brother to “Come get the gun and take it to the car.” (One supposes GangBangerLand was closed?),

     A medical professional taking visitors’ temperatures at the entrance (Covid, dontcha know?) noted the woman put the purse behind a planter and post the child beside it, She called security, who called a sheriff’s deputy, who searched the bag, discovering the fully loaded handgun. In her defense, I guess one can never tell when one of the costumed characters might act up and have to be “put down” by an armed guest.