Awesome Animal Fact - Cash's Ostrich

My rather unusual theme for the next few Awesome Animal Facts: ANIMALS THAT HAVE ATTACKED MUSICIANS.

Did you know Johnny Cash was almost killed by one of his ostriches in 1981? Years ago, I read Cash's autobiography, and I was fascinated by his account of this attack, in which he wrote that he was almost killed by the animal.

Johnny Cash kept an animal park on his property in Tennessee. The musician was on a walk by himself when he got into a confrontation with his rather territorial male ostrich. Cash decided to show the bird who was in charge, but this didn't go as well as he'd hoped.

The ostrich kicked him, and its long defensive claw tore open his abdomen and broke two of his ribs. Then he fell to the ground, hit a large rock, and broke two more ribs. The gash in his stomach would have been much worse if the downward-slashing claw had not stopped when it hit Cash's belt buckle.

As if that weren't bad enough, the injury almost killed him in a second way. The prescribed drugs given to him for the pain led him back into the drug addiction that he had struggled to overcome years before.

Photo Credits:
- Johnny Cash - Dillan Stradlin - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International - via Wikimedia Commons
- Ostrich with mouth open - DepositPhotos