The moral of the story, a rather painful one, is to stay clear of wild animals. In this case, an 83-year-old woman from Arizona learned that the hard way.
Jeri Longenbaugh awoke to her dogs barking in the middle of the night. She went outside and saw an elk calf inside her gated yard. She tried to coax it out when a cow elk suddenly appeared out of the darkness and started kicking her until she blacked out. She suffered bruises all over her body and has 17 stitches in her leg.
“You don’t want to look like I do now, that’s the first message, and the second message is this, don’t trust them, they’re wild animals, they’ll protect their young at all cost–even if you mean them no harm,” Longenbaugh told KXNV-TV.
Longenbaugh says she has lived among elk for 34 years but never had anything remotely close to this happen before.