When animals attack

Vince W said:
Jaws by Peter Benchley.
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When I was setting up my paltry examples I had in mind animals attacking en masse, like swarms, but after posting I immediately thought, "Oh but then there are all those stories about lone animals". Jaws was first on my mind. Thanks for bringing it up.
 
Sargeant_Fox said:
Really? I don't remember that; I read Saki's stories more than a decade ago. Time to look it up.
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In the story,
since the plot is about two hunters trapped in the forest--each vows that when the rescue team arrives--their party will kill the other one as an interloper--and at the end they decide to be friends and share the land. So they are waiting for the rescue team, and then spot figures approaching on the horizon and instead of it being either of their hunting parties, it's wolves. To them, the hunters are interlopers. You could say it isn't an attack for no reason--but it is a story where animals attacking is the main thrust of the idea. I love that story--someone on this site got me aware of it.
 
Sargeant_Fox said:
I've recently noticed a subgenre of horror: animals, all of them or a single species, suddenly start attacking humans for no discernible reason. Examples include Arthur Machen's The Terror (1917), Frank Baker's The Birds (1936) and Daphne du Maurier's "The Birds" short-story (1952).

What do you think of this premise?

Can you come up with more examples?
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"The Violence of the Lambs" by John Jeremiah Sullivan. It's in his essay collection Pulphead but should be readable here:

www.gq.com

Violence of the Lambs

The greatest threat to civilization in the next half century is not nuclear arms or global warming or a super-resistant virus that will wipe us out by the millions. John Jeremiah Sullivan contemplates the coming battle between man and beast.
www.gq.com www.gq.com

In C. S. Lewis's novel That Hideous Strength, a government-sponsored agency with a totalitarian agenda experiments on living animals and has many living animals as captives awaiting torment. At the climax of the novel, suprahuman intelligences free them and encourage them to destroy their former masters. One of the attacking animals is a bear who had earlier wandered away from the lab grounds. He is befriended by some decent humans, but returns to the campus of the vivisectors to help set the world right.
 
KGeo777 said:
Yes-but the plot is Ahab seeking the whale for the confrontation so it isn't exactly spontaneous or a surprise.

"I don't understand Mr. Starbuck--why did this whale bite off my leg after I pierced his back with 10 harpoons? What does he have against me?"
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" Captain , it is my option that the whale communicating to you his displeasure at having those 10 harps stuck in his back ";)
 
KGeo777 said:
THE INTERLOPERS by Saki takes a humorously ironic twist on the idea.
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Just looked it up in my old copy; although I didn't remember the title, after all these years I still remembered the final twist: "Wolves!"
 
BAYLOR said:
Im surprised no one has mentioned Leiningan Verses the Ants by Carl Stepensen , In 1954 was adapted into the film The Naked Jungle with Charlton Heston in the lead role.

Empire of the Ants by H G Wells
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There's also Wells' short story, "The Sea Raiders."
 
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