I'll add another keeping with the camping theme that's going. Do people count as animals? I suppose sometimes they do so I'll include it here...

I when I was a teenager I was camping with my girlfriend (now my wife) deep in the national forest north of Lake George, CO. We were in the tent late that night and we heard someone coming down the trail making a bunch of noise. This individual was walking in a way that made him sound drunk. I had no gun but grabbed my knife. The footsteps stopped right outside our tent and I was sure the zipper was going to start un-zipping any second. Then the footsteps started walking again off into the forest until we couldn't hear them anymore.

What worried me was that on previous camping trips in this same area with the bros, self proclaimed miners had come out of the woodwork late at night a number of times and invited themselves to sit around the fire with us. These guys were dirty enough and crazy enough that we thought for sure they were legit mountain men. So I thought the guy outside our tent on the night I described above could have been one of these crazy guys and that had me very concerned since I had my girl with me. Luckily it ended up fine.

That night I came to a very scary realization. Any one of the many nights we spent out there as highschoolers in the forest we could have easily become "missing persons" since we didn't have any self defense tools with us.