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Most pet owners would agree that the animals we bring into our homes often become members of the family in their own right.
Unfortunately, that doesn’t apply to all animals, especially those who should have never been in the home in the first place — and who sometimes turn on their owners.
Some pet owners, unfortunately, learn the hard way that sometimes nurture is second to nature — and some animals will always be wild. Here are nine disturbing stories of people attacked by their animals that highlight that hard lesson.
Terry Vance Garner And His Man-Eating Pigs
In October 2012, a 69-year-old farmer in Oregon named Terry Vance Garner disappeared after he left to feed his roughly 700-pound pigs. Hours later, his family members made a horrifying discovery: Garner’s dentures and parts of his body inside the pig pen.
Garner’s brother, Michael, told The Independent that Garner was a “good-hearted guy” and “animals were his life.” Unfortunately, they ended his life as well.
It was possible that Garner had suffered a heart attack while feeding the pigs, but at the time, county investigators described the situation as “so doggone weird” that they had to examine every possibility — including the possibility that Garner’s pigs intentionally knocked him over so they could devour him.
In fact, one of the pigs had bitten Garner previously. Michael Garner expressed that the farmer originally intended to put the large sow down, but he later changed his mind.
John Killefer, head of the Animal and Rangeland Sciences Department at Oregon State University at the time, explained that domestic pigs typically aren’t as hostile as feral hogs, but offered a reminder that “there is some degree of danger associated with any animal”.
It should also be noted that in contrast to most other farm animals like cows, horses, and chickens, pigs are omnivorous — and apparently, sometimes that includes fresh human meat.
Unfortunately, investigators never were able to determine if Terry Vance Garner died of a medical condition or if, in the end, his beloved farm animals really did commit a heinously Orwellian act of violence.
Marius Els And His Pet Hippopotamus
It’s easy to forget that hippos are some of the most dangerous animals on the planet, but they are naturally aggressive animals with incredibly sharp tusks that weigh over 3,000 pounds — and they pose as much of a threat on land as in the water, moving up to 30 miles per hour.
And while hippos are rarely seen outside of zoos in the United States, wild one are a fairly common sight in other parts of the world, especially in South Africa.
Still, that didn’t stop Marius Els from adopting a 5-month-old hippo that he named Humphrey back in 2005.
According to The Guardian Els brought Humphrey back to his 400-acre farm, where he also kept a giraffe and a rhinoceros, and raised him for six years, describing Humphrey as “like a son” and “just like a human.”
But over the years, people close to Els expressed concern over the hippo’s presence on the farm.
His wife, Louise, never felt comfortable with the animal nearby, and Humphrey had caused numerous problems before — he once chased a 52-year-old man and his 7-year-old grandson while they were canoeing, forcing them to hide in a tree for two hours to escape.
Humphrey was also responsible for killing calves that belonged to Els’ business partner and regularly broke out of his enclosure to chase golfers at a nearby club.
Despite this, Els described Humphrey as a “gentle giant.”
“It’s a little bit dangerous, but I trust him with my heart that he will not harm anybody,” Els said. “I can swim with him. I go in the water. He allows me to get on his back, and I ride him like a horse. He swims with me.”
As Sky News reported, though, it turned out Humphrey was anything but gentle.
In November 2011, Els’ body was discovered submerged in the river where Humphrey had first been rescued in a flood years earlier.
He had been bitten multiple times by Humphrey’s sharp, canine-like tusks and dragged into the water, leaving his body mutilated and savaged, left in the river for “an unknown period,” according to paramedics.
“There’s a relationship between me and Humphrey, and that’s what some people don’t understand,” Els once said. “They think you can only have a relationship with dogs, cats, and domestic animals.
“But I have a relationship with the most dangerous animal in Africa.”
The Wife Of An Exotic Pet Dealer Killed By A Pet Bear Named Teddy
Kelly Ann Walz and her husband Michael had a hilltop menagerie near Allentown, Pennsylvania where they kept numerous wild animals including an African lion, a cougar, a jaguar, a tiger, a leopard, and two servals.
But of all the dangerous animals they kept, the most beloved was their black bear, Teddy.
Lamentably, Teddy also proved to be their most deadly.
On Oct. 5, 2009, The Seattle Times reported that Kelly Ann Walz’s body had been found inside Teddy’s cage, not far away from Teddy’s own dead body.
The Walzes had raised Teddy for nine years, from cubhood to adulthood, at their home and kept him in a 15-by-15-foot steel and concrete cage.
They had reportedly never had an incident with an animal before and generally handled their pets safely, tossing food into one end of the cage while they cleaned to keep the animals at bay.
Kelly Ann Walz was cleaning Teddy’s cage the day he turned on her.
“She’s done it 1,000 times,” said the Walz’s friend and neighbor, Scott Castone. “And on 1,001, something happened.”
Castone’s children saw the 350-pound bear attack Walz from their home, about a football field’s length away from the Walz’s, and began screaming for help.
By the time Scott Castone arrived at his neighbor’s property with his handgun, Kelly Ann Walz was dead, and Teddy was walking out of the cage.
Castone opened fire.
“He got off of her to come out to me,” Castone said. “I did what anyone would do. It was pretty much self-defense.”
Tim Conway, a supervisor for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, said that most people who keep wild animals generally have two-section cages so they can isolate the animal while cleaning. For some reason, Kelly Ann Walz neglected to do this.
“Why this woman chose to go in the same area that the bear was in is beyond me. It’s a fatal mistake,” he said. “These things are not tame animals; they’re wild animals.”
The Gruesome Death Of A German Exotic Pet Owner By A Legion Of Reptiles And Spiders
If the idea of living in a tiny apartment with more than 200 spiders and lizards sounds like something out of a horror movie, then imagine the terror of walking into such an apartment only to find the occupant dead and the multitude of critters inside crawling over his body.
For German police officers in 2004, that nightmare became a reality when they entered the apartment of Mark Voegel.
And indeed, according to a report from The Courier Mail, a police spokesman described the scene as “like a horror movie.”
“Giant webs draped him, spiders were all over him. They were coming out of his nose and his mouth,” they said. “Larger pieces of flesh torn off by the lizards were scooped up and taken back to the webs of tarantulas and other bird-eating spiders.”
Voegel was reportedly described as a recluse, never inviting anyone to his small apartment in Dortmund — perhaps understandably, as police likened it to a cross between botanical gardens and the butterfly breeding ground from The Silence of the Lambs.
The spider bite that killed him came from one of his favorite pets, a black widow named Bettina. The bite was roughly 15 times more potent than a rattlesnake’s and more lethal than cobra and coral snake venom.
In addition to over 200 spiders, Voegel kept a boa constrictor and several other snakes, poisonous South American frogs, and a gecko named Helmut.
He was believed to have been dead for between one and two weeks before police found him after neighbors reported a foul smell coming from Voegel’s apartment.
In that time, a tarantula had built a nest the size of a swallow’s in one ceiling corner.
According to UPI, many of the cages and terrariums inside the apartment were left open, allowing the bizarre pets to roam free and gorge on Voegel’s dead body.
Police said that the apartment was “bathed in a weird green light.”
Alongside the spiders, snakes, and lizards that feasted on Voegel’s corpse were several thousand termites.
Travis, The Beloved Family Chimp Who Left A Woman Without A Face
Up until Feb. 16, 2009, a chimpanzee known as Travis had been like a child to Sandra Herold — even more so after the passing of her daughter in 2000 and her husband in 2005.
But the two sudden losses sent both Sandra and Travis into a years-long depression, and the chimp’s behavior grew increasingly erratic.
Once, in 2003, Travis escaped from Sandra and Jerome Herold’s car and ran loose for several hours after someone threw trash at him through the car’s window.
Unfortunately, Travis’ erratic behavior only continued from there, and his isolation and the codependence he and Sandra formed ultimately led Travis to a breaking point.
After a weekend getaway with her good friend, Charla Nash, Sandra returned to the home occupied only by her and Travis, who was by this point severely overweight and spending most of his time eating or watching television.
While Sandra was tidying up, Travis stole her keys and ran out of the house. In a panic, Sandra called Charla and asked her to come and help lure Travis back inside.
When Charla arrived, she tried to get Travis back into the home by coaxing him with his favorite toy, a Tickle-Me-Elmo doll. But something inside Travis snapped then, and a moment later he was on top of Nash, ripping into her face with his teeth and barraging her with his hands.
Sandra beat Travis with a shovel, but he didn’t relent. She stabbed him with a knife, and he ran inside leading a trail of blood as Sandra called the police.
Police arrived to find Nash beaten to a pulp, the entirety of her face missing alongside most of her fingers. She should have been dead, based on the injuries — but then she reached out for them.
She survived by some miracle, but her life was forever changed. To this day, she is horribly disfigured, blind, and wearing someone else’s face.
A Woman Said Her Nine Wolfdogs Gave Her “Unqualified Love” — Then They Mauled Her To Death
In May 2012, a woman in Salem Township, Pennsylvania, named Sandra Piovesan was found dead after bleeding to death inside an electrified pen that she used to contain eight of her nine hybrid wolfdogs.
Her autopsy confirmed the unthinkable to be true: Piovesan had not died of natural causes; her pets attacked and mauled her until she bled out, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette reported.
This breed of hybrid wolves, or hybrid dogs, or hybrid wolfdogs, depending on who is talking, got its start by breeding wolves with dogs like Alaskan malamutes, German shepherds, and Siberian huskies. Typically, they are not prone to sudden violent attacks — but they do require strict, specific training.
At the time, John Davis, vice president of the United States American Wolfdog Association, said that the organization tried to keep an ongoing registry of bred wolfdogs as well as working to improve the breed overall, but expressed that he had never heard Piovesan’s name before her death.
In fact, Davis himself had owned wolfdogs since the late ’80s, and told the Post Gazette that attacks were rare, “even less so than for many breeds.”
“We don’t need the headlines,” he said.
However, a Humane Agent from Westmoreland County, Elaine Gower, told TribLIVE that hybrid wolves pose a greater threat to humans than wild wolves. Wild wolves fear humans, but hybrid wolves don’t, which means they are more likely to attack.
And two years prior to the attack on Piovesan, one of her hybrid wolfdogs attacked a friend of hers — but that friend never filed an official complaint.
“We were all scared that someday, somehow, those wolves would escape that pen and hurt some child or someone,” Gower said.
The eight dogs who lived in the pen were euthanized after, as it was unclear which of them had attacked Piovesan. The ninth, Spirit, lived inside the house along with two Rottweilers and was taken to a nearby animal shelter.
Ultimately, no one was ever able to determine what may have caused the hybrid wolves to attack.
Perhaps Piovesan tried to break up a fight or one of the wolfdogs tried to establish dominance in the back, but without anyone else there to witness the attack, the truth will likely remain a mystery.
A Randy Camel In Australia Humped Its Owner To Death
For Pam Weaver’s 60th birthday in 2007, her husband Noel got her a camel to keep as a pet. Halfway to her 61st birthday, Pam Weaver was killed by her pet camel.
Weaver was discovered by her husband and daughter at the family’s sheep and cattle ranch near Mitchell, Australia, Metro reported.
Weaver’s daughter was in the middle of cooking dinner, a fresh cup of tea on set out on the table, when she ran out to the backyard to find that the 330-pound camel had knocked her mother to the ground and apparently attempted to mate with her, ultimately crushing her beneath its weight.
She had “one definite footprint” on the side of her face and another on her arm.
Detective Craig Gregory, who was present at the scene, said, “I would say it had probably been playing or it may even be a sexual sort of thing.”
Camel expert Chris Hill, however, said he had no doubts the camel’s behavior was sexual.
In fact, the 10-month-old camel had been displaying erratic behavior for some time before the incident, reportedly attempting to straddle other animals including the family’s pet goat, according to The Courier Mail.
“It had a bit of a habit with a goat, knocking it over and sort of straddling it and laying on top of it,” Gregory said. “It’s been chased off the goat a few times.”
Pam Weaver, evidently, had a love of exotic pets. For her birthday, her family had considered buying her a llama or alpaca, but they found that the animals were too expensive.
Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, Australia has a fairly large wild camel population which has grown since they were introduced to the country in the 1800s — which made the camel a more affordable pet option.
Hill also explained that young camels aren’t aggressive creatures, but they also aren’t necessarily pets and could be dangerous if treated as such.
“It was only young and it had been hand-reared,” Gregory said. “It drinks out of a bottle and eats out of your hand.”
A Dog Hoarder In Arkansas Died An Untimely Death — Then The Dogs Devoured Her
Sometimes, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing, as evidenced by a 65-year-old woman from Arkansas who, at one point, kept over 100 dogs on her property.
As reported by The Huffington Post, Van Buren County Animal Control Director Reta Tharp said that in 2012, animal control had to remove 103 dogs from the woman’s property. It was easier that time, she said, because the woman was alive to help.
When they found her dead in November 2015, however, it was chaos.
The woman had suffered from Hepatitis C, and it led to her sudden death one day that autumn. At the time, she had over 50 dogs on the property, many of whom were malnourished and aggressive — a veterinarian at the scene was bitten.
“The deputy had to shoot some of them that day in order to get into the house,” Tharp said. “They had never been vaccinated for anything. The dogs were inbred, some of them were sick. Just, mountains of issues. It was just a situation I don’t want to go through again.”
After the initial discovery, authorities were advised by the state’s health department to return to the property and euthanize an additional 26 of the dogs in the interest of public health and safety.
“We did all that we can do to protect the community,” Tharp said. “There are neighbors in that area. There are children. The dogs were starting to wander into their yards.”
Only eight dogs remained afterward, either waiting to be put down or captured and reconditioned.
Authorities were also unable to identify where, exactly, all the dogs had come from in the first place. “She just took them in,” Tharp said, “and before you knew it, it was out of hand.”
According to the ASPCA, there are 900 to 2,000 new cases of animal hoarding each year in the United States, involving nearly 250,000 animals.
A Florida Couple Was Sentenced To 12 Years In Prison After Their Pet Python Strangled Their Infant Daughter
In 2009, Jaren Hare and Charles Darnell were living together with Hare’s 2-year-old daughter and the family’s pet: a severely underweight Burmese python named Gypsy who lived in a cage over which a quilt was thrown as a lid.
Per ABC News, Gypsy should have weighed around 150 pounds. At the time, the nine-foot-long albino snake weighed 13 pounds — and hadn’t been fed for a month.
During Hare and Darnell’s trial, a medical examiner testified that Gypsy was trying to eat their daughter, Shaianna, when it strangled her. Officially, they were charged with third degree murder, manslaughter, and child neglect.
Despite the defense’s arguments that the incident was an unfortunate, terrible mistake, it was clear to the jury that the situation only happened because Hare and Darnell were careless as both pet owners and parents.
In fact, Hare’s mother even testified against her in court, saying that she had not only warned her daughter about the dangers of owning the snake but also offered to buy it and keep it at her home in a locked enclosure.
Hare’s attorney, meanwhile, argued that the snake had been a family pet for five years and was always docile before the incident. They argued that the situation would be different if the snake had been venomous, but since Gypsy was “gentle,” Hare and Darnell weren’t to blame for Shaianna’s death.
Darnell’s attorney argued that the only thing the couple was guilty of was having a “stupid pet.”
“The snake is not at fault in this case. It’s a wild animal,” Assistant State Attorney Pete Magrino told the jury. “The responsibility for the death of that child is those defendants right there.”
And as terrifying as stories like this can be, Magrino’s argument highlights the most important factor: These are wild animals.
Sometimes, they just don’t belong in your home.
Next, learn about the most dangerous animals on planet Earth. Then, read about animals who fought back against poachers and left them dead.
