- Hey everyone out there in YouTube land,
Coyote Peterson here, and I've got
the answer to the question you've all been asking.
(roaring, wild, pounding music)
Well, we got a lot of great questions this past week.
And I'm scrolling through my phone,
and I've been collecting them this
whole season on Dragon Tails,
and the one question that everybody wants to know is,
"Have you ever been bitten by a snapping turtle?"
(screams in pain)
"If you have been bitten, how bad does it hurt?"
That hurt.
"Can they bite off your finger?"
"Do they let go?"
Guys, I was bitten and you saw it
this past week on Dragon Tails.
That was the worst bite that I've ever taken
from a snapping turtle.
I've been nipped before, I get clawed up all the time.
I'm not worried about the claws.
The bites usually come on like my leg,
or they'll just nip me and it's never been a big turtle.
But when we were filming at Lost Lake,
there was a 26 pound turtle, and I was distracted.
There were 9 snapping turtles on that dock
when we were working, filming that episode.
And I've never been around that many
snapping turtles before at once.
One of the turtles had a bunch of
mud and algae on its head, and I went
to the edge of the dock and dipped it off
into the water and as I was lifting him up,
there was a leaf on his head.
And for some reason, I thought
I could quickly brush that leaf off
and the moment that I did,
he turned his head and he struck
and he got the whole top of my thumb in his beak.
The bite force in these animals is unbelievable.
It happened so quickly, I didn't even feel it.
I felt the hit, and then I looked at my thumb
and it immediately just ...
(spewing sound)
blood spewing everywhere.
Now, unfortunately, Mark wasn't
rolling the camera at that moment,
but I looked at my thumb and I said to him,
"Dude, that turtle just bit the top of my thumb off."
And he's like, "Wait, what?"
And that's the moment where you guys saw in the episode
that the camera was just sitting on the dock
and we're pacing back and forth and I'm saying,
"Well, at the very least, we got to film this."
I wanted you guys to see how bad that bite was.
So we finished out weighing the turtle,
and then we went into how to medically treat it.
So, we're going to show you guys
a little bit of that footage here,
and we didn't show this shot in the actual episode.
This is the moment where I want to say,
if you're squeamish, if you're under 18 years old,
if you don't like blood, if you don't wanna see
what my thumb looked like after the bite,
click away from the video right now.
You're not going to hurt my feelings.
I don't wanna make you sick to your stomach.
But if you're ready, I'm gonna give you a second.
Here we go, we're gonna show you the shot.
It's going to be out of focus at first,
then it will come into focus, and there it is.
That is the top of my thumb,
hacked off by a snapping turtle.
It was bad, it hurt like crazy.
We cleaned it up with antiseptics right there in the field.
- [Mark] Yeah, he took a good chunk of you.
- [Voice Off-screen] You'll have a scar.
- [Mark] Yeah.
- [Coyote] At least he didn't get my whole finger.
- [Mark] Yeah, it could have been a lot worse guys.
- [Coyote] Mark mushed the meat back down
into my thumb, we wrapped it up really tight,
and we continued on filming, because
that's what we had to do.
We're out there in the middle of nowhere,
it's not like we could leave and come back
and reshoot the episode, so we just kept going.
When we got back to civilization,
we cleaned it up really good, and I'm fine.
I'm lucky I didn't get an infection,
reptiles have a lot of bacteria in their mouths.
That's one thing that I was afraid of,
and if you want to see my thumb now, there it is.
You can see there, it's healing up pretty well.
That's 19 days later.
The turtle really just sliced off the epidermis layer
and didn't quite get down into the dermis, so I got lucky.
Had he caught me above the nail,
he probably would have completely
chopped off the top of my thumb.
I think the moral of this story is that
snapping turtles are incredibly dangerous.
They're beautiful reptiles, I love working with them.
I've been doing this for 20 years.
But hopefully you guys are going to walk away with a lesson.
You should not go out there and try to catch these animals.
I'm experienced at doing this.
If you see a snapping turtle in the wild,
take a picture of it with your phone,
from a safe distance.
Send me that picture.
Don't send me a picture of you
trying to catch a snapping turtle,
because I'm just going to be worried
that you guys are going to take
an injury like I did.
Great questions, guys.
I'm so glad that I got to answer that one
and give you a little insight as to what happens
when Coyote does get injured in the field.
Keep writing in.
Next week, let's do something silly.
Not so serious, not so gross.
Send me in some goofy questions
and I'll be answering them out here in the wild.
I'm Coyote Peterson.
Be brave, stay wild, keep your thumbs up.
We'll see you guys next Friday.
(animal growling, bird hooting)
Let's just film this weight with him.
Be like, I just got bit by this guy.
Right, well this is what happens
when you handle snapping turtles.
This turtle just bit the top of my thumb off.
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(animal growling, bird hooting)