This blog is about consequences. Death, being one of life’s two certain consequences, could thusly be our focal point. But this blog is also about professionalism; as such, we’ll be posting a series that plays off a well-tread interwebs theme: the most dangerous jobs. It’s kind of a tired subject—every time the US Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out the latest work fatality numbers, lots of sites post about it, with minimal commentary. Alaskan crab fishermen top the list every year, and yada yada.

So we’re doing it differently: The Deadliest Jobs, What’s Worse edition. Each post will offer a pair of unrelated jobs, and you get to decide which is worse. Participation! hurray.

As a drinking game, what’s worse functions as a verbal version of high-low or quarters—a simple, either/or procedure that lets the reckless kids drink many tall boys or bottles of Boones in a short amount of time. Even if you were/are too sophisticated for drinking games in your youth, the chances are good you’ve played what’s worse at some point.

One player poses a situation that would suck to be in; the next player tries to out-suck the first; and the player whose turn it is must decide which of the two situations is worse (in the naughty version, if your choice wasn’t picked, you take a drink/pound your drink). The rules are simple, the appeal universal. Another universal property: play a game of what’s worse for long enough, and you will veer off into the matter of the worst/creepiest way to die.

Would you rather starve or be eaten? Hm. Starving requires a lot of patience.

Would you rather drown or burn? Depends on where you grew up.

Would you rather be gored or trampled? Right, I know, me too.

You may start by flinching at both options; but before long a little switch gets flipped: you begin choosing the way you’d prefer to die. There’s a feeling of strength that comes in repeatedly choosing the manner of your death—you cease to be afraid of these grisly fates. You feel powerful. But you are not powerful; you’ve just been imagining yourself dying, over and again.

Because we want to encourage imagination without encouraging a false sense of immortality, we’ll be spacing the entries out. The first pairing is about the animal kingdom, but involves neither crabs nor fishing.

Part 1: Elephant Keeper v Matador

Elephant Keeper. Things everybody knows about elephants: they’re huge (the largest land mammal on earth), they have trunks, the males have horns, and they never forget. And yet, folks are generally surprised to learn that elephant keepers are killed every year, just in American and European zoos. That surprise stems mostly from limited exposure; also, the elephants in The Jungle Book were bored and disorganized. We non-elephant-keeping people fail to use the little information we have in forming even a hypothetical threat assessment. But let’s recap:

- This is a beast the size of a duplex
- with long ivory spears built into its face, and
- it holds a grudge forever.

In the wild, elephants attack people who get too close; in captivity, they attack because they get angry about their tiny little lives—and, they attack to get revenge for past mistreatment.

At a zoo in the Netherlands, a keeper was fatally wounded by a cow (female) African elephant. Without warning, and with no discernable motive. The elephants at the zoo have a daily training routine, and, on this day in 2003, the 20-year-old cow gave its keeper a giant head butt. The keeper fell to the ground, and the elephant came after him with her head and feet.

This attack was from a female, and females are, as a rule, more easygoing and eager to please than males. It’s a female who leads the herd (The Jungle Book got very little right about elephants). Meanwhile, adult bull elephants goes through a sexually charged period called musth, during which they’re extremely dangerous and required by law to be properly secured.

During the dehydrating summer months of February to June in Kerala (a state on the southwestern coast of India) the temple festival season is at it peak. Elephants are in great demand. It’s a time of backbreaking work for these captives, who endure horrible conditions and initiation rituals conducted by mahouts (elephant keepers). This year, the festival season was chaotic, with roughly 63 elephants going AWOL—typically in crowded public venues. More than 10 mahouts were gored, then thrown about or crushed to death under the feet or heads of their elephants during the period of February to April. Since January 2006, 47 mahouts have been killed. So, maybe don’t be in a rush to be an elephant keeper; try another breed, like bee keeper.

Oh, wait. Bees populations across North America are dying off en masse, so that’s out, too. Maybe you should be a fighter instead of keeper—a bullfighter, perhaps?

Matador. Bulls are massive, and a fighting bull is bred to be an agile, persistent, angry beast. The capacity for sustained anger is a main trait in a prized line of fighting bulls—and that capacity does get passed down, like father, like son. Some breeding lines are prized and carefully preserved: in Spain, lines of renowned fighting bulls date back as far as the 19th century. These animals are famous—think Barbarro, but mean and proud and not boring—and their line is alive today. Like elephants, bulls have horns, but

- they’re pointier, and
- their owner gets tired only slowly, and
- by the time the matador steps in the ring, they’ve been made really, really mad.

The matador flourishes and prances with his red cape—offering a target for the bull, who’s very pissed off, due to the many barbs in his shoulders (put there by the picadors). This is a 2,000-pound mass of rage with hard feet and two cream-colored excaliburs on his forehead. With each pass, he gets more tired and more annoyed.

The moment of truth is when the matador does not evade the charge but uses a thin sword to pierce through the spinal column and into the heart of the noble beast.

In Spain, a successful bullfight ends in death for the bull, though in some other parts of the world fights are nonfatal. A matador of manolete, the classical style, is trained to divert the bull with the muleta but comes perilously close to the right horn as he makes the fatal sword-thrust between the shoulders and through the aorta. If the thrust misses and is nonfatal, well, the matador no longer has his sword, and guess who wants to take somebody else with him. The famous French bullfighter Jean-Pierre Rachou died when a bull’s horn tore his femoral artery.

It’s not unheard of for angry bulls to smash their way through barriers and charge the surrounding crowd of spectators. In this, like the Indian mahout, the matador has a special capacity to not just live the danger, but spread the danger. Good times.

..Mahout or Matador? What’s worse.