An Australian dairy farmer named Ebony Churchill had quite the terrifying run-in earlier this week with a koala when she was out moving a herd of cows. She tells Adelaide’s The Advertiser that she saw the koala walking on the ground — not the rarest thing to come across in Australia — and assumed it was just walking to another tree. That was when ALL KOALA HELL BROKE LOOSE, which she had the quick thinking to capture in the above video.
“He was close but then he started running towards me and I thought I better speed up (on the quad bike),” she said. “But the more I sped up, the faster he got.
“I thought if I got further down the track, he would lose interest. I got to the end of the cows and couldn’t go any further so that’s when I bailed off the bike. They’ve got hard, sharp claws and I didn’t want to have him grabbing at my leg as I was on the bike.”
Koalas get the reputation of being slow, sleepy, dim-witted, and adorable, however a cursory Google search for “do koalas attack humans” paints quite a different story. Churchill was smart to flee. I mean, the things subsist on poisonous leaves, for gosh-dang sake. Not a quality I trust in a creature, that’s for damn sure.
(The Advertiser via Gawker)