Plenty of people who saw the video of a 65-year-old grandfather being tossed in the air like a rag doll by a bison in Yellowstone National Park last weekend assumed that the man must have gotten close enough to the animal to piss it off. At Yellowstone, which has the largest population of the majestic animals, bison attacks are rare relative to the number of park visitors overall. But the animals often called fluffy cows have also racked up the most human-involved injuries of any Yellowstone resident — and last weekend’s attack was the second this summer.

But Carl McDaniel and his 13-year-old grandson, who visit Yellowstone every year, were abiding by the park’s guidance and giving the animal plenty of space, according to Mike MacLeod, a professional wildlife photographer who witnessed the incident. The same bison had charged through the campground minutes before, sending tourists scrambling, and was resting on a patch of ground when the man and his grandson came into view. “They were walking along the road, quite a ways away from the bison, and it started running at them,” MacLeod told Cowboy State Daily, theorizing that a pickup truck driving into the bison’s sightline at the same moment might have agitated it.

McDaniel told CNN that as he lay on the ground after being flipped by the bison, it stood over him. “He could have stomped on me, he could have gored me, he could have done almost anything to take my life, but he did not do so.” Instead, MacLeod and a group of other campers made enough noise to make the bison leave. With one leg broken in 4 places, McDaniel was rushed to the hospital and into surgery. According to MacLeod, McDaniel’s grandson said that his grandfather wanted to see the video to make sure he hadn’t done anything to cause the attack. MacLeod is certain he didn’t. “You can tell in the video it’s not his fault. You can tell from the very beginning.”

Assumptions that the man had breached the bison’s personal space are understandable, given that bison in natural parks are frequently underestimated by visitors attempting to interact with them. A 2024 tweet from the National Parks Service referenced the danger with a message that read, “Believe in yourself like visitors who believe they can pet a bison.”

But despite common-sense warnings to avoid approaching or interacting with animals in the wild, humans continue to press their luck and, in many cases, suffer exactly the consequences you’d expect. In January, a skier in China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region was mauled by a snow leopard while trying to take a selfie from an estimated 10 feet away; visitors had been warned the previous day about a leopard sighting.

In February 2025, a Canadian visitor to Turks and Caicos attempted a similar stunt with a shark and suffered so much damage to her hands that both had to be amputated. A few months later, a diver and father of four strapped on a GoPro, jumped into the shark-filled water off the coast of Israel and never returned. Not long after that, a Florida man with no permit for shark fishing posed with a recently caught lemon shark and was way too surprised when the fish whipped around and chomped his leg.

And with each visit to the beach town of Hobart, Tasmania’s unofficial ambassador Neil the Seal draws a bigger audience that includes a handful of people approaching him for selfies. The 5-year-old, 2,000-pound elephant seal should be learning how to play-fight with other juvenile males; instead, in their absence, he fights fences and traffic bollards. The people getting within a few yards of him for action shots have Tasmanian wildlife officials bracing for tragedy every time the seal hauls himself ashore. (Neil flerped back out to sea last weekend, presumably to find a less stressful place to molt).

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“Generally, if an animal is alert to your presence, you’re already too close,” says Shervin Hess, conservation manager at Portland’s Oregon Zoo. And because humans have grown comfortable — perhaps too comfortable — around wild animals in the age of social media and smartphones, more often than not it’s the animals who wind up paying for our heedlessness. Here are a few things to keep in mind when you cross paths in the wild.

They’ve already had enough of us

This week, the president of the United States announced a change in the wording of the Endangered Species Act, which was signed into law in 1973. Its original wording defines the word “harm” as “an act which actually kills or injures wildlife. Such an act may include significant habitat modification or degradation where it actually kills or injures wildlife by significantly impairing essential behavioral patterns, including breeding, feeding or sheltering.”

There have been previous efforts to downgrade “significant habitat modification or degradation,” removing it from the category of “harm” and putting it into more of a “sucks for you” category. But as of July 14, the definition has been altered, and previously protected wildlife habitats are now fair game for developers — which means, among other things, that species and habitat-recovery programs are now in jeopardy. A statement from Bart Melton of the Conservation Association of National Parks noted that the change “defies common sense, science, and paves the way for mining, oil and gas drilling, logging, and development in areas that are crucial to the survival of some of our most vulnerable species. This rule ignores decades of conservation science and could undermine recovery efforts for more than 600 species.”

Infrastructure development, deforestation, pollution and urban sprawl have already caused rampant global habitat loss. Research from the Environmental Protection Agency found that in the United States alone, hundreds of species have gone extinct in the last century. Changes to habitats don’t need to be huge or systemic to have disruptive effects on wildlife, Hess says; in 2021 an illegal drone that crashed into a protected seabird nesting ground in Southern California caused panicked adult birds to flee, abandoning an estimated 2,000 eggs.

It’s important to consider our conservation footprint in addition to our carbon footprint, and part of this just requires paying attention to the wildlife around us in the places we live, and the human impact on it.

Remember you’re on their turf

Golfers at an 18-hole course in my neighborhood regularly find themselves teeing off in the company of coyotes who live in the area, and there’s a tacit agreement between the animals and humans to keep a respectful distance so that both can use the space as they do. When I asked one golfer if he’d ever been tempted to take a selfie with a coyote, he said, “No, because that would be really stupid.”

Human-wildlife coexistence is necessary for maintaining biodiversity, but there’s reason to worry that some animals’ ability to tolerate humans makes too many of the latter confuse coexistence with ownership. Earlier this week, birding podcasters Victor and Ruben Stoll posted video taken in Belize’s Mountain Pine Ridge of one of them chasing and petting a jaguar cub. The tiny Central American country, home to a number of protected species, has dealt with an increase in tourist harassment of its wildlife in recent years. Speaking to a news outlet, Belize Zoo executive director Celso Poot noted that even brief handling by humans can cause long-term physiological harm to wild animals. (“It builds up stress hormones. The muscles lock up, and over time that animal can be affected.”)

These incidents aren’t isolated. The black bear cub pulled from a tree next to an apartment complex by residents who wanted a selfie; the freshwater crocodile grabbed by a Canadian influencer who mocked its cries of protest; the baby wombat pulled screaming from its mother by an American influencer all occurred in pursuit of content and social-media clout. And none of the humans involved, at least so far, have faced consequences severe enough to deter others from doing the same.

“Humans have to remember that we are on their turf,” says Hess, who works with global species-recovery and wildlife-restoration organizations in his capacity as a conservation expert. “When there’s a baby seal sitting alone on a beach, it’s not because it’s stranded, but because the mother has parked it there while she goes fishing.” In other words, just because it’s there doesn’t mean you’re entitled to pet it.

Seriously, put your phone away.

It’s alarming that this no longer goes without saying, but here we are. To be clear, it is perfectly understandable that you want to take selfies with wild animals. “Animals are amazing. Seeing one in the wild is like seeing a celebrity,” says Hess. “And that can make people lose their common sense.”

This is an understatement. The number of people who either take or attempt to take selfies with wild animals grew so rapidly on Instagram in the 2010s that World Animal Protection introduced 2017’s Wildlife Selfie Code, which delivers a pop-up message (“You are searching for a topic that may be associated with posts that encourage harmful behavior to animals and the environment”) to anyone searching the app for hashtags like #slothselfie.

The demand for wild-animal selfies fuels illegal operations like the exotic-pet trade and exploitative tourism-focused practices like Thailand’s tiger-selfie industry. These, in turn, make abuse of the animals themselves routine (tigers are often beaten, starved and drugged to make them docile and photo-ready), but also impede broader conservation projects. “It can be really hard when you see so many other people doing it,” says Hess. “But you can be the person who says, ‘Hey guys, let’s back up, let’s put away the phones.’”

Even when human-wildlife interactions don’t result in catastrophe, the desire to own or claim animals to prove that we have done so isn’t the same thing as loving them. And giving animals space, not demanding their attention and not treating them like props isn’t just respectful coexistence — it can save would-be action photographers hurt and embarrassment. The woman whose hands were bitten off in Turks and Caicos wanted a unique snapshot for social media; instead, she will always be known as the woman who tried to take a selfie with a shark, and there’s no coming back from that.

For Hess, simply being in the presence of a polar bear in the Arctic or an orangutan in Borneo means much more than capturing them in photos. “Wild animals are so awe-inspiring,” he says. “Maybe people should take something from that.”

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On Monday Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ​posted a video on X, the government’s de facto policy platform, explaining that the Pentagon and the Justice Department created a newfangled joint task force to identify and prosecute press leaks. 

The “joint task force” model of all things law enforcement became increasingly popular in the wake of 9/11. Now, under Donald Trump’s administration, it appears press freedom is the new terrorism. 

“George Washington himself battled leaks, insider threats and espionage,” Hegseth noted in the video. However, I’m fairly certain the secretary doesn’t know that a reason Washington disliked leaks was because of the “Conway Cabal” — one of the earliest American political leaks. It involved private letters between two senior Continental Army officers who wanted Washington replaced as commander-in-chief of the army during the Revolution.

If Hegseth dug a little deeper, he would also learn that the Founding Fathers, including Washington, frequently relied on stealth statecraft, planting press stories and other leaky behavior. Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams and James Madison were colonial cyberpunks who used various encryption methods and strategically used information to influence politics, public opinion and the course of history. Jefferson was quite literally the nation’s OG cryptographer, a master of codes and ciphers that would make modern-day hackers blush. Benjamin Franklin, of course, was America’s first great newsman — a writer, publisher, editor and champion of an unbridled free press.

Hegseth’s “new” anti-leak task force is a dramatic escalatory reincarnation of older censorship efforts that even Washington would have scorned. The move also drips with hypocrisy, irony and mendacity in light of the secretary’s own leaky tenure and the Justice Department’s near-simultaneous subpoenas of five New York Times journalists who reported on Trump’s Qatari-gifted, inadequately secured designer airplane. 

Government anti-leak campaigns have a long and ignominious history, from Richard Nixon’s illegal “Plumbers” (1971-72) and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s expansion of interagency leak investigations (2001-2008) to Barack Obama’s “National Insider Threat Task Force” (2011) and Donald Trump’s first term “DOJ Leak Task Force” (2017). Obama’s group famously pictured my clients Edward Snowden and Thomas Drake alongside actual spies and mass murderers on a “WANTED”-style poster of “Those that have done us harm.” 

In once again teaming up, the Justice Department and the Pentagon can dust off the Defense Counterintelligence & Security Agency’s training courses, tool kits, templates and videos that discourage employees from choosing their conscience over their career. One McCarthyesque poster encouraged employees to rat on one another for “general suspicious behaviors,” including First Amendment activity like “making anti-U.S. comments.” Anti-leak posters featured cutesy slogans like “There’s no delete when you tweet!” and “Every leak makes us weak!” My personal favorite was “Free speech doesn’t mean careless talk,” when that’s exactly what it means. While you can’t shout “fire” in a crowded theater, there’s no Supreme Court ruling holding that “careless talk” is exempt from First Amendment protection; otherwise, Trump’s Truth Social posts and X feed would have been shut down long ago.

I am no stranger to government witchhunts for “leakers.” After blowing the whistle in America’s first terrorism prosecution after 9/11, the Justice Department  investigated me as part of an over-the-top leak probe. Despite years of severe and grueling retaliation — including anonymous government officials publicly calling me a “turncoat,” referring me to the state bars where I’m licensed as a lawyer and putting me on the “No-Fly” list — I got lucky because the DOJ had not yet seized upon using the antiquated Espionage Act as its weapon of choice to go after whistleblowers. All I had to do was clear my name, pay enormous legal fees, miss a bunch of flights and rebuild my entire career.

The next batch of civil servants weren’t so lucky. U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning; Air Force whistleblower Reality Winner; CIA whistleblowers Jeffrey Sterling and John Kiriakou; and NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Hale faced prosecution under the draconian Espionage Act and stared down decades in prison for revealing serious government malfeasance including war crimes, secret mass surveillance, civilian drone strikes and Russia’s attempts at election interference. (Trump was also charged under the Espionage Act in the classified documents case, but U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the indictment. Special counsel Jack Smith appealed in an attempt to undo the dismissal, but once Trump returned to office, Smith dismissed its appeal.)

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In full hair and makeup, Hegseth started his X video announcing the task force with a telling statement: “As you know, we live in a dynamic and dangerous threat environment where access to and accumulation of closely held information is key to understanding our world.” His words sounded shockingly similar to those of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who recently testified that secret military information helped “educate people about how the world works so that through understanding we might bring about something better.” I agree with both Hegseth and Assange that secret government information has, in fact, been key to understanding larger world dynamics, especially the global impact of war, mass surveillance, torture and other human rights violations. 

When it comes to the deleterious effects of leaking, Hegseth knows this territory well. He’s led the leakiest Pentagon ever and was responsible for one of the biggest leaks in military history. Early in his tenure, he fired three senior Pentagon officials accused of leaking. Then we had Signalgate, in which the secretary and other principals discussed real-time U.S. airstrikes on Yemen in a Signal group chat to which a journalist was added inadvertently. In fact, the Pentagon’s own inspector general issued a scathing report that found Hegseth had endangered troops and violated department policy by using the commercially-available Signal app for official business. Yet the secretary’s indisputable gift is his ability to fail up in direct proportion to his fireable conduct. 

So what will this new joint task force yield? It’s not meant to yield anything. It’s meant to chill the sharing of vital information. There will be a marked increase of federal reporter subpoenas and search warrants in national security leak cases. There will be an increase in FBI agents showing up on reporters’ doorsteps. There will be more armed raids of journalists’ homes, regardless of whether they are the subject or target of an investigation. There will be even more criminal probes and prosecutions of journalists and whistleblowers. The biggest losers of all, unfortunately, will be the public and its right to know what the government is doing, often under a Reflecting Pool-level film of algaescent secrecy.

While the Pentagon and Justice Department stand up their joint anti-leak task force, they should take a look into why leaks are on the rise despite ever more draconian measures like tracking employees’ computer downloads, restricting reporter access to government spaces and polygraphing ordinary civil servants. Such an inquiry would reveal that leaking is a time-honored practice and safety valve in a democracy, as Hegseth actually acknowledged without even realizing it. That’s something worthy of study by a joint task force of two of the largest departments in the U.S. government.

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