Viral Video of a Sea Lion Snatching a Little Girl From a Pier Will Make You Want to Stay Indoors Forever
Nature is one terrifying beast. Oh sure, it looks cute, and it’s full of all these quirky animals. Sea lions have little whiskers and look like funny little old men, but then when you’re least expecting it, they do something like this sea lion in Canada who shocked everybody by leaping out of the water and snatching a little girl from a pier.
In a YouTube video from a man named Michael Fujiwara, a bunch of people are just milling around Steveston Fisherman’s Wharf, in Richmond, British Columbia. A giant sea lion shows up, and everyone is very impressed by how cool and big it is, and they film it and take pictures for a while. A little girl sits down on a ledge on the side of the pier with her back to the water while everyone continues to chat about how cool everything is, and then suddenly, the sea lion leaps out of the water and snatches her right off the pier.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMDtibc13fc]
The attack happens at around 1:35 in the video, and it’s heart-stopping in just how fast and out of nowhere it was. One moment he was in the water and she was out, and the next he just leaped up and grabbed her.
Fortunately, everybody is OK. One of the men leaped in after her the instant it happened–before the guy with the phone had even finished saying “Oh my God!”–and pulled her out of the water. Somehow, both he and the little girl were uninjured. That’s a huge relief, given how scary that video was, but it’s not doing much for my newfound compulsion to stay in the house with the doors locked for the rest of my life so sea lions can’t get me.
Of course people are already blaming the parents for a host of imagined failings. One commenter even slammed the parents for making a video instead of watching and rescuing their daughter, even though the person who made the video was a complete stranger, and none of the girl’s family appeared to be on their phones. Everyone in the area thought the sea lion was in the water and well out of reach, they just didn’t know how fast a sea lion could leap out of the water like that.
(Image: YouTube / Michael Fujiwara)
