When animals attack, there is frequently someone nearby to video the hilarity for the rest of us to enjoy.

More than schadenfreude, these videos provide us with a valuable lesson in how NOT to. For example, from watching these videos I have learned not to:

·         Shower myself in female deer piss and then hang around rutting bucks

·         Stand too close to the panda cage

·         Poke a leopard with a stick

·         Believe that a tamed wild animal is actually tame and no longer wild

·         Poke a crocodile with a stick

·         Mess with an octopus

·         Poke anything with a stick, including another stick, because that stick might turn out to be some giant freaky bug

My wife and I are both PADI certified scuba divers, although we don’t exactly have a lot of dives under our weight belts. We were still relatively new to the sport when we decided to give it a try on Quadra Island, which is one of those little islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland of British Columbia, BC.

My parents used to have a nice place there with a big dock on Hyacinth Bay, but they recently decided that they didn’t like us hanging around them so much and sold it. Anyway, back when they did have it we rented some full-body 7mm wetsuits and the other requisite gear so we could see what the bottom of the bay looked like.

I’ll skip past all the gearing up safety check stuff to the part about even the thickest wetsuit not being warm enough for these waters. Seriously, if you’re going scuba diving off the BC coast, you need a dry suit.

The other thing you need to know is that August is a crappy time to scuba dive there. The reason is the water is like pea soup at that time of year from all the plankton or algae or something. Visibility is about 20 feet, whereas a few months later it can be some of the clearest water in the world. It’s also late fall in Canada by then, so take my advice about the dry suit.

Enough bitching about the cold. Because of the poor visibility we decided to hold hands while diving so we didn’t get separated. It was just the two of us and I like being happily married so it seemed like the romantic thing to do.

Man, there were some big-ass crabs down there. I wish I’d brought some kind of net to catch the buggers in and we could have had a feast later.

Then we saw an octopus and we both used the universal scuba hand signal for “Hey! Look at that cool thing over there!” We pointed at it.

And then we swam over to it.

And then, at the exact same moment, we shared what I believe is the only legitimate telepathic communication we’ve ever had in over 20 years of being together: We stopped about ten feet away and mentally communicated to each other: This is close enough.

That was because we’d both seen the video about what happens to stupid people who get too close to octopi: the octopus gets pissed and tries to suck your face off. Meanwhile, your friend decides to keep the video camera rolling rather than help you get the pissed off octopus away from your face so that he can sell said video to some TV show and one day some people like my wife and me will know better than to get too close to an octopus.

So we looked at the octopus from ten feet away. Perhaps the octopus looked back. Perhaps he thought to himself: If those assholes come any closer I’m gonna suck their faces off. Perhaps he had things on his cephalopod brain other than a couple of hand-holding scuba divers.

I don’t know. All I know is that we kept our distance and no one got their face sucked off. Sorry about the lack of drama there. Consider this a public service announcement about not pissing off octopi and keeping your face intact.