Vexed Crocodile Attempts to Death Roll His Caretaker

Many people who work with animals often say things like, “If you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life.” And the connection and joy we get from taking care of animals far surpasses any office or retail job one might hold. Well, let’s just say this caretaker in the video below definitely was not experiencing joy on this day. 

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Caretaker Feeding Crocodile

The short video recorded just above takes us to a zoo enclosure of some kind. The Animal World076 shared this video with their 48,000+ followers. This channel is a dedicated platform for animals, both wild and domestic. Their newest videos are of leopards, lions, tigers, birds, and wolves. 

Crocodile’s Attempts a Death Roll

As the video begins above, we see a group of children gathered around this glass enclosure to watch the caretaker feed this hungry crocodile. As she feeds him his regular food, he goes to bite it and ends up taking her hand with him. At first, the woman is seen smiling, likely trying to hide her fear or assuming the crocodile was being playful.

However, by 12 seconds, it was very clear this crocodile was not in a playful mood. He begins to yank her to the point where she falls into the water with him. She’s holding on for her life when one of the guests comes up to see if he can help her. He attempts to twist her to perform his famous death roll. But, the caretaker wrapped her legs around him, and then the guest jumped on top of the crocodile and used his body weight and force around his neck to hold him down. 

What is a Death Roll?

Crocodiles (Crocodylus acutus) are famous for doing what’s called a death roll on their prey in order to subdue them properly. According to the Scientific American, a crocodile’s death roll “is the powerful and violent twisting that wrenches limbs from sockets and muscle from bone when a crocodylian clamps onto a morsel and does its best impression of a washer on spin cycle.” 

You’ve probably seen these famous death rolls if you’ve ever seen footage from an African safari. Crocodiles will grab prey looking to cross their rivers. Crocodiles will hunt prey such as deer, buffalo, antelope, zebra, and fish. But, as we can see from the video above, this death roll didn’t have to do with food. This could very well have been a situation where the crocodile was feeling threatened and reacted with aggression. 

The photo featured at the top of this post is © meunierd/Shutterstock.com