A Brazilian hunter cornered a giant anteater in 2012 and chose not to fire his rifle, worried he would hit his own dogs. He stepped in with a knife instead. The animal reared up on its back legs, wrapped both front legs around him, and its claws tore open the big artery in his groin. He bled to death at the scene before his sons could pull him loose.
The animal that did this has no teeth at all. Its eyesight is so weak it is close to blind. It runs at about 91 degrees Fahrenheit, roughly 8 degrees colder than your body, one of the lowest temperatures of any mammal on Earth. The reason is its diet: pure ants carry almost no calories. It is about the size of a Labrador, 70 to 100 pounds, and it walks on its knuckles to keep its front claws from going dull.
Those claws run about four inches long. They evolved to rip open termite mounds packed as hard as dried clay, and they fold into a grip strong enough to hold off a jaguar. In 2016 a camera trap in Brazil caught a jaguar sneaking up behind one. The anteater stood up, spread its arms wide, and slashed. The cat backed off and left. Wildlife biologists have found jaguars in the wild killed by anteater claws, with deep wounds across the chest and neck.
A 2014 paper in the journal Wilderness and Environmental Medicine collected two more human deaths, both hunters in Brazil. Both died the same way the 2012 victim did: the claws cut the femoral artery in the leg, and they bled out within minutes. A zookeeper in Argentina died the same way in 2007.
The viral clip still gets the gentle part right. This animal is not aggressive by nature. The scientist who leads the IUCN's anteater group, which runs the global endangered-species list, says she has never once heard of a wild anteater attacking a person on its own. It runs cold, moves slowly, and spends its day flicking a two-foot tongue in and out of ant nests about 150 times a minute, swallowing close to 35,000 insects. It only fights when something pins it against a wall, or a pack of dogs traps it in a corner.
So both halves of that clip are true. It does play like a kitten. It can also gut the top predator of its jungle. A toothless anteater the size of a family dog is one of the few animals alive that a jaguar will back away from.
The “nooooo” got me
🎬: Voicemails for Isabelle
Voicemails for Isabelle is a 2026 Netflix romantic comedy starring Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson, directed by Leah McKendrick, about a woman who leaves voicemails for her deceased sister, only for the messages to be received by a stranger (Robinson) who begins to fall for her. The film follows Deutch’s character, Jill, as she copes with her sister Isabelle’s de*th by continuing to call her old number, which has been reassigned to Wes (Robinson). The cast also includes Nick Offerman, Lukas Gage, and Harry Shum Jr.
📺: Netflix
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