Travel Tales: Wild Animals is a collection of wildlife-viewing stories including some very scary tales of often coming close to serious trouble with wild animals in your travels but managing to just barely escape. It is also a collection of the fearful sorts of things that can and do happen to travelers, but, mostly, these will not happen to you. But if they do, you get to experience real raw fear, including sometimes fear for your very own life. These are very unsettling occasions that may pop up now and again in your travels.

Travel Tales: Wild Animals includes specific tales of close calls, and, hopefully, great escapes with encounters by travelers, largely on safari in Africa and India, and elsewhere, even, with lions, tigers, snakes, hippos, elephants, Cape buffalos, crocodiles, dogs, bulls, monkeys, baboons, hyenas, birds of prey, cougars, bears, and more.

This collection of true tales is the place to hear about them. I hope they don't happen to you, but if they do, I hope you manage to escape and overcome. Hopefully, you'll be all the wiser for learning about such things through this book. By hearing the accounts of the near mishaps of others, you'll gain a healthier respect of what it is like to experience the true wild. And with a better respect of mother nature in the wild, one gains better enjoyment and the utmost appreciation of creation.

Travel Tales: Wild Animals includes many examples of bad things that happen to travelers despite their best efforts to avoid such things. But bad things do happen on occasion, and the best thing to do is to avoid them in the first place. But if we cannot, we should do our best to escape them.

Again, while there's no easy, simple miracle list of failsafe strategies for always staying safe and surviving each dangerous situation with wild animals that may arise, there are, nevertheless, meaningful takeaway strategies from the many examples presented in this book that'll enable one to develop and keep in mind ways to enhance personal safety and reduce the risks of potentially dangerous outcomes.

While many of the tales in this book are not strictly about life and death situations surrounding wildlife, many of them are, and many are about difficult, embarrassing, and otherwise annoying nuisances that we all would do well to avoid and do without.

The scope and variety of close calls with wild animals in this book may surprise you. And some would never likely even occur to you. Some are even humorous, like, for example, the many examples of exotic wild animal meats that you'd never eat on a dare back home, but are, instead, all in when it comes to trying, say, pressed rabbit in Peru or even steak tartare during your travels in the south of France! (I won't be the spoiler and reveal it to you here!)

Yes, such an adventure may never even occur to you, but after hearing about it in this book, it may give you pause—who knows? Maybe you'll never, ever eat a bizarre, strange dish in the first or next instance.

Sure, you'll hear stories in this book that will alert you to situations that may never occur to you. But if you avoid even one new travel danger that you might never have even thought of by listening to this book, then I'll have accomplished a very useful purpose.