They may be cute, but ...
5 Adorable Animals That Are Turning to the Dark Side
Squirrels are Exhibit A in what a cute face and a bushy tail can do for your cred among humans. As a species, we risk bodily injury and spikes in insurance rates whenever one dashes in front of our cars, because it is impossible not to feel like an asshole if you crush one. Hell, in Ice Age, the cutest character was the squirrel, and he had fangs.
The animal kingdom is like prison. If you don't try the softest guy on your cell-block, you become the softest guy on the cell-block. Unfortunately, this is a difficult lesson to teach children, because among the squirrels at Cuesta Park in Mount Park, Calif., word seems to be getting around that humans, unlike the Wu-Tang Clan, are something to fuck with.
Between May 2006 and March 2007, multiple squirrels attacked 13 people, mostly children. One four-year-old boy thought he was being hugged by his furry little woodland friend until it started digging its fingers into his scalp. At this point the boy started screaming and rolling in the grass, which we've found is usually enough to scare away anything within 20 feet of us. But in this case, the squirrel just dug in that much harder, playing scalp rodeo until a grown-up came over and broke things up.
Fish and Game declared the squirrels in the park a "threat to continued public safety" and began trapping and killing them. Not by using a cage with a bunch of nuts in it, but by using a decoy baby stroller. See, a number of the attacks had occurred when the squirrels jumped into baby carriages -- presumably to suck the infants' souls from their lips for some dark squirrel harvest. They'd been doing it so frequently that it was apparently the only way the park rangers knew to trap them. The day after the first squirrel was captured in a baby carriage, another squirrel jumped onto a four-year-old girl's face, leaving scratches to both cheeks and her forehead that likely would have spelled out "snitch" if squirrels knew how to spell.
This is not an isolated incident. A squirrel attacked six people in the U.K. before being captured, and the town of Bennington, VT, is currently being terrorized by a rogue gray squirrel. You might start thinking that our dogs and cats have the right idea, with their much more hostile stance toward inter-species relations, but that's just because you haven't heard what happened in a Russian park in 2005. A stray dog was barking at a gang of local squirrels, as dogs are wont to do. Likely former Spetsnaz agents, the squirrels became irritated and decided to shut the dog up in much the same way the Russian Mafia shuts people up: by killing it.
Not pictured: Baseball bats and a lot of lye soap.
According to eyewitness testimony, the squirrels descended and tore the dog to pieces. The linked BBC report notes that one Russian scientist questioned the authenticity of the report, and goes on to note that "squirrels without sources of protein might attack birds' nests," because Russian scientists are bad at being reassuring.
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