A grandfather who was violently hurled into the air by a bison at Yellowstone National Park has claimed the beast was actually quite gentle.
Carl McDaniel, 65, of Washington State, was attacked by the agitated bison at Bridge Bay Compound in the national park as he and his grandson were walking by at around 8.30pm on Friday.
Heart-stopping video of the attack showed the bull bison becoming frustrated and charging at McDaniel, chasing him through the trees.
Once the animal caught up to the great-grandfather, it hooked him with one of its horns and aggressively flung him into the air.
McDaniel broke his femur – the strongest bone in the body – in four places near his hip in the assault, but was already able to stand on Monday after undergoing surgery the day before, he told CNN.
‘I will be doing physical therapy for the next few days to get to walk, but it was not as catastrophic as it could have been,’ he said.
McDaniel, a community activist, then noted that the six-foot-tall animal could have easily killed him.
‘When I was on the ground, immobile, unable to move, he was right on top of me,’ he recounted. ‘He could have stomped on me, he could have gored me, he could have done almost anything to take my life and he did not do so.’
Carl McDaniel, 65, of Washington State, was violently hurled into the air by a bison at Yellowstone National Park on Friday
Heart-stopping video captured the moment the frustrated beast hooked McDaniel and effectively rag dolled him several feet into the air
It remains unclear what may have provoked the beast to attack the grandfather on Friday evening, but the terrifying encounter came amid bison mating season when the males of the species have increased testosterone levels.
The bison had already been roaming the campground and charging at other campers – including a group of teenage boys who were able to run away from the area – in the moments before McDaniel and his grandson passed by.
It then took a break to rest in the dirt near a picnic table covered with dinner leftovers just off a campground road.
‘When he got up, it was kicking like a rodeo horse who’s clearly very agitated,’ Mike MacLeod, a Montana photographer who captured the ordeal, told The New York Times.
It was then that McDaniel drove up in a pickup truck with his grandson and began taking photos of the bison, apparently catching the beast’s attention.
‘As soon as they stop taking pictures, the bison stands up and the grandfather’s like, “Let’s get out of here. I don’t like this,”‘ MacLeod added.
Thinking quickly, McDaniel said he then decided to lure the beast away from his grandson.
‘There was little time to decide what to do,’ he recounted to CNN. ‘At that point, he was within 100 yards; he could be to us in seconds, so I told my grandson to run in one direction and I went the other to try and draw him away.’
The angry beast was near a table with food scraps prior to charging McDaniel and one of his grandsons, who escaped without injury, around 8.30pm
The grandfather was attacked at Bridge Bay Compound near Yellowstone Lake in the national park. The moment was captured on video, which has since gone viral
McDaniel’s grandson was then able to flee and lose the beast, but the Washington state grandfather was not as lucky.
Even after effectively flipping McDaniel into the air, the bison still ‘didn’t leave,’ according to MacLeod.
‘He stood right over Carl, and he was really, really angry,’ MacLeod said. ‘His head’s pumping up and down and he displayed all that aggressive behavior.’
At that point, MacLeod said that he ran at the animal ‘pumping my arms up and down, yelling at the top of my lungs and jumping up trying to look big and distracting.’
The attempt to distract the bull bison apparently paid off, as other onlookers soon joined in and the creature subsequently ran off.
When MacLeod then ran up to McDaniel, who is known as a community activist in the town of Kendall, Washington, ‘the first thing he asked is “How is my grandson?”‘ he told Fox News.
‘It really felt like the grandfather kind of saved his grandson,’ MacLeod said. ‘[He’d] taken the brunt of the attack.’
As McDaniel then waited for an ambulance to arrive, a nurse at the scene tended to his leg while another bystander held his head.
McDaniel was said to be mainly concerned about his grandson in the aftermath
‘He was in a lot of pain, but was conscious and joking the whole time,’ MacLeod told Cowboy State Daily.
At one point during the wait, MacLeod said he joked to McDaniel that, ‘As a former US Army paratrooper, I give that landing a 9.5 out of 10.’
‘And he’s like, “Well if you just caught me five years ago, I could have done so much better,’ MacLeod said. ‘So he was jovial, trying to make light of his pain, but he was obviously in a lot of pain.’
Yet, MacLeod said, the grandfather was mostly concerned with making sure it was not his fault the beast attacked.
‘It’s not his fault,’ MacLeod insisted. ‘You can tell from the beginning. That was a really, really angry bison.’
Park regulations require visitors to stay about 75 feet from the bison at all times, leading some online commenters to speculate about whether McDaniel had been closer than that.
However, MacLeod said that ‘most people [saw] that these two did not ask for it’ and that everyone he observed that day kept a ‘respectful distance.’