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Nebraska DE Takes Selfie with Raccoon, Kills Animal After Being Bitten
December 5, 2014
"It was a raccoon selfie gone completely wrong."
Let these words from Jack Gangwish set the table for one of the weirder stories you'll hear today.
Gangwish, a defensive end at Nebraska, says he ended up killing a raccoon after being bitten by the animal while trying to take a selfie.
The 21-year-old junior told his story to the Lincoln Journal Star's Jonathan Edwards (h/t Dr. Saturday's Nick Bromberg).
Gangwish told Edwards he was driving around the outskirts of Lincoln, Nebraska, when he saw a "cute" raccoon on the side of the road. He then did what anyone else would do, stopping his pickup truck and wrangling the animal into an Instagram-optimized position.
Gangwish has since deleted all tweets regarding the raccoon incident. We have preserved some of them via screen shot. First off we have his tweet of the selfie.
Unfortunately, wild animals have little appreciation for the finer subtleties of self-captured glamor shots, and the raccoon responded by biting Gangwish on the calf.
Knowing he would need to have the raccoon tested for rabies, Gangwish grabbed a crescent wrench from his truck and attempted to "subdue" the animal. Unfortunately, wrenches are not butterfly nets, and Gangwish ended up bludgeoning the animal to death.
"It was death by crescent wrench," Gangwish told Edwards.
It should be noted that rabies tests involve euthanizing an animal and removing its head for neurological testing. So capturing the raccoon, in this case, would've only delayed its inevitable demise.
Gangwish later tweeted out several now-deleted messages regarding the incident. He wrote that football might already cause the symptoms of rabies and dubbed himself "THE COON WHISPERER."
Get ready to coach the "Coon Whisperer," Mike Riley. And don't tell him you used to work with beavers.
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