Also, while I’m in a Carl Akeley state of mind, he once choke-punched a leopard. At night. While recovering from malaria.
(this is a cleaned up, colorized version of a picture from 1896)
So how do you get in a situation where you choke-punch a leopard to death? You mess up. You mess up bad. Akeley had been commissioned to get a bunch of African animal specimens for the Field Museum in Chicago, and he’d had a lousy day of it. He’d shot a nice warthog and an unusable hyena. (I’d like to point out that this was 1896- the ethics of collection were much different back then. Akeley was deeply anti-sport hunting and considered his work vital to conserving these animals- he thought that in twenty or thirty years, there’d be none left due to overhunting by American and European sport hunters, and he wanted to preserve what he could so that future generations could at least see what things used to be like. His dioramas were meant to accurately depict these animals’ natural habitats and the way they looked in Africa. This was also before zoos had made the shift to naturalistic exhibits- accurate museum dioramas were a much more reliable way of understanding what these habitats really looked like.)
So after the miserable hyena failure, Akeley then wanted to go after some ostriches, but they kept eluding him, and when he and his assistant got back to camp, he saw a (live) hyena dragging his warthog away. He then checked on his other hyena and it was gone, too. By then, the sun had set and the hunting day was done. He heard a noise in the bush, fired once without looking, and got snarled at by a furious leopard, who wanted to eat a diseased hyena in peace. She approached, he shot a couple more times, she leaped, he shot again- and the rifle was empty. She leaped at him, he threw up his hands, and she started biting the hell out of his arm.
Again, it was night when all this happened. Humans don’t have great night vision. You know what does have great night vision? Leopards. This was not a fight he should have won.
Akeley made a fist and worked it down her throat (so that she couldn’t close her mouth all the way) all while wrestling the furious animal, eventually getting his knees on her chest and choking her until she let go- after which he slit her throat, because she was still showing signs of life. He then dragged himself back to camp (his assistant dragged the leopard) and demanded all the antiseptic liquid they had. He returned to Chicago soon after, but not because he wanted to- the expedition leader contracted malaria, and the trip ended early.
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