Grain Silos vs. African Wild Dogs - Which Is Nature's Most Ruthless Hunter?

I was tasked with writing an article in the "Cracked.com" style, indistinguishable from one that might be carried on their website.

I may have an odd clientele.

...Cracked is actually pretty good though.

This is a repost from my archive of "articles that made less than 6 cents."

Ruthless killer, or Kellogg's "Cornflakes" storage medium?

Oddly enough, I am intimately familiar with grain elevators and grain silos from my time spent trading commodities. Hedgers use them to buy and store grain when it's cheaper, selling it when it is more expensive, which drops the price back down. This is an example of how healthy "speculation" can benefit markets overall.

However, it was until catching up on some old episodes of the Showtime series Dexter that I was reminded they could also be an implement of terrifying destruction.

They are also dark.

Grain entrapment occurs when a loose area of grain or void breaks loose, pulling a worker in. Even with no machinery running, this is a very dangerous situation, but often there is a maw of doom at the bottom grinding or sieving the grain on its way out. Frequently, these accidents occur when blockages appear during unloading and someone attempts to break them free, and that means machinery is often running.

Apparently, "not-caring" may be a sub-optimal response to "Jimmy cracking corn".

With a devastatingly high kill percentage of 45%, 42% of which is attributed to corn (coincidence?), Grain Silos have a number of more pedestrian, man-made terrors beaten handily, such as:

1. All airplane crashes: ~4.3% fatality rate
2. "Devastating" airplane crashes only: ~24% fatality rate
3. All car crashes: ~ .5% (one half of one percent)
4. Shark Attacks: ~20%

Even if you combine those percentages, the Grain Silo is still more ruthless!

Clearly, dethroning the Grain Silo will require the help of mother nature. Unfortuantely even lions only have about an 18% success rate by day, and Tigers observed in captive preserves only between 5-10%. However, there is one un-sung hero of the prowl we can turn to, the African Wild Dog.

Oddly enough, in Iowa, African Wild Dog attack statistics were unavailable.

African Wild Dogs run down over 85% of the prey they chase, the highest percentage I'm aware for any hunter. Unfortunately, due to their relatively small size, they often lose up to half of that prey to other predators and scavengers. This puts them in a dead heat with the cold, calculating Grain Silo again.

If you work on or around a farm, or just visit, be extremely careful about giant piles of anything. As we learned in Jurassic Park, even larger, more benign piles are best avoided.

Please see the acknowledgement post here.

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Sources: OSHA.gov, NLM, NIH, Wikipedia
Copyright: Dexter, Jurassic Park