Top Five Animals I Wouldn't Fuck With

Sorry to drop the F-bomb on you, but this is a meme I'd like to see do well. Credit goes to Maxwell Edison.

#5 Hippopotamus (real)
What? A Hippo? But they're cute! They look like they're made of soap! Come on, Hippos are herbivores. They're totally not dangerous.
Yeah. That's what they want you to think.

#4 Cassowary (real)
A flightless bird native to the rainforests of south-east Asia. They killed Japanese and British-Australian soldiers in WWII. Why? I don't know. They're birds. How do you reason with that? Look how they're coloured. Look at those mad eyes. Those things will kill you because they mistake you for the moon.
Allow me to follow my academic bent and quote Wikipedia:
"More recently, Cassowaries have been known to lose their natural fear of people. As a result, large areas of Australian National Parks have been temporarily closed to avoid human contact with the bird."

#3 Fenrir (Norse mythology)
I won't go into the story here, but Fenrir is scary on two levels. One, he's a collosal, immortal wolf with superhuman intelligence. OK, so there's that. But he's also the externalisation of the fear of the gods. Fear, as we know, leads to anger, and anger leads to hate. At the end of the story Fenrir is chained up in a cave, gagged with a sword, and will remain there until the end of the world. That's a long time to build up resentment. The strange thing is, he doesn't do anything ba duntil he's struggling to get free and in roder to chain him the gods resort to deceit and Tyr ends up loosing a hand. I feel virtually certain there's a political allegory to be made here.

#2 Stonefish (Horrifyingly real)
The Stonefish is an artefact of pure malice. It spends it's whole life hiding in sand offshore, waiting for someone to stand on it. The venomous spines on their back deliver a poison that is both agonizing and quickly fatal, and that can only be defeated with torniquets, fire, or amputation (the common folk practice, of screaming and going into violent siezures, is less effective). The Stonefish, meanwhile, smugly scoots off to a different part of the beach. These are the reason I refused to go into the sea for years.

#1. The Locusts of Abaddon (Biblical)
From Revelations 9:7-10.
"And the shapes of the locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle; and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold, and their faces were as the faces of men. And they had hair as the hair of women, and their teeth were as the teeth of lions. And they had breastplates, as it were breastplates of iron; and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle. And they had tails like unto scorpions, and there were stings in their tails: and their power was to hurt men five months."
Monstrous portmanteux creatures designed and built to hunt down those of us who jumped the wrong way in the celestial game of guess-the-card. That's scary.