7 Adorable Animals That Are Surprisingly Violent

They’re cute. They’re cuddly. They’re killers. 

1. KOALA

It may seem hard to believe, but the world’s most cuddly animal has a dark side. Most of the time, these tree-huggers keep to themselves, adhering to a strict schedule of snacking and snoozing (up to 22 hours a day). But sometimes, a koala snaps. Koala-on-koala violence is generally pretty mild, but they have been known to go after dogs and even humans.

For example: In December 2014, Mary Anne Forster of South Australia found herself at the receiving end of a vicious bite after trying to protect her two dogs from an aggressive koala. The koala sank its teeth into Forster’s leg and refused to let go, relenting only after she reached into its mouth and pried its jaws apart with her hands. Forster then walked her dogs more than a mile back to her house before going to the hospital for stitches, proving that the only thing tougher than Australian wildlife is an Australian.

2. BEAVER

They’ve got huge, razor-sharp teeth that never stop growing. They’re fiercely territorial. They build complex underwater lodges with architectural precision. And, most importantly, they don’t take crap from anybody. There was the fisherman in Belarus who died when a beaver bit through his femoral artery. There was the lake in an Alaskan dog park where angry beavers sent a half-dozen dogs to the emergency vet for stitches, prompting park officials to post signs reading "WARNING AGGRESSIVE BEAVERS ARE LIVING IN UNIVERSITY LAKE!"

And those are just the healthy, well-adjusted ones. Rabid beavers have gone after swimmers in Canada and the U.S., including an 83-year-old woman in Lake Bancroft, Virginia. “There is no way I will swim in that place again,” she said.

3. COW

Not all cows. But some cows. And those cows are terrifying. They’re called Heck cattle, also known—and I am not making this up—as “Nazi Super Cows.”

In the 1920s and '30s, German brother zoologists Heinz and Lutz Heck sought to recreate the extinct wild ox called the aurochs, which featured heavily in Teutonic mythology. They chose Spanish fighting cattle for their prehistoric shape and aggression, and envisioned a world where they could hunt these enormous, angry cows. Then, you know, World War II. The Nazis fell.

The uber-cows survived. They survive to this day, and available for purchase by those with a death wish. Farmer/photographer Derek Gow brought a herd of Heck cattle to his U.K. farm in 2009 and even successfully bred them before realizing he was in over his head. “They would try to kill anyone,” he told The Guardian. “Dealing with that was not a lot of fun at all.”

4. DOLPHIN

It sounds outrageous, but it’s true: dolphins are actually pretty horrible.

Researchers have suspected as much since the 1990s, when the battered corpses of hundreds of porpoises and baby dolphins started washing up on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually the researchers concluded that male dolphins were slaughtering other dolphins, including their own babies, just because they could [PDF].

This news was especially alarming to federal officials, who were concerned about human safety in the growing and unregulated industry of dolphin tourism. “It’s a time bomb waiting to go off,” said a spokeswoman for the National Marine Fisheries Service.

If that’s not bad enough, dolphins have sexually assaulted divers and swimmers on numerous occasions, and have been known to play volleyball with helpless baby sharks.

5. SLOW LORIS

After the dolphin, the slow loris looks like a saint. A shy, weird, Cute Overload-worthy saint … with a mouth full of needle-like teeth and venomous elbows.

Yes, the slow loris has venomous elbows. When a loris feels threatened, it throws its arms over its head. This is adorable, but it’s also strategic, giving the little primate an opportunity to lick the toxin-producing glands in its upper arms and fill its mouth with venom. While the venom itself is only strong enough to kill smaller animals, loris bites have sent humans—including one researcher—to the hospital in anaphylactic shock.

Some scientists argue that the loris’s elbow grease isn’t venom at all, and that its ability to kill is purely incidental. This is probably not much comfort to someone who’s just been bitten.6. SWAN
Like most cows, most swans are fine. Sure, they get a bit territorial during breeding season, but who doesn’t? But the swans that are not fine are really, really not fine.

Take Hannibal, the swan who killed 15 other swans and injured dozens more on the grounds of Pembroke Castle in Wales. Hannibal bit his victims, beat them with his wings, broke their toes, and held their heads underwater until they drowned. After each brutal attack, Hannibal would parade in front of his kill, displaying the carnage for his wife—Mrs. Hannibal—and cygnet.

And then there’s Mr. Asbo, the swan that terrorized rowers on the River Cam for years. Mr. Asbo (short for “Anti-Social Behaviour Orders”) regularly attacked and even capsized small boats before turning his aggression on larger vessels. Eventually, even the RSPCA agreed that Mr. Asbo was “out of control” and got a license to relocate the pair to another county. One year later, a young male swan appeared in the same spot and started threatening people. Locals named the cocky newcomer Asboy, after his father.

7. HIPPOPOTAMUS

Each year, the humble hippopotamus kills more people than lions, tigers, or bears. Or sharks, for that matter. (In the hippo’s defense, humans kill quite a lot of hippopotamuses. This is not cool.) They’re intensely aggressive, which is a dangerous quality in animals that can reach 17 feet long and 10,000 pounds. They’re not slow, either: They can reach speeds of up to 30 miles per hour on land, and even faster in the water. They go after each other, after humans, after crocodiles, and even after boats and jeeps, flipping the crafts and attacking the inhabitants. From time to time, some guy will decide that Hippo Rules (i.e. Hippos Are Not for Hugging) don’t apply to him. This never ends well. Don’t be that guy.

Remember: Wild animals are not for snuggling. Of all the species mentioned above, the most dangerous by far is Homo sapiens.