“Hi, whatcha doin’ little man?” Jennifer Long asked a snapping turtle while filming a video of it. The snapping turtle answered her question, but not in the way she expected. Instead of feeling embarrassed, Long posted her lesson learned to TikTok as a warning to others not to make her same mistake. Spoiler alert: Don’t pet snapping turtles.
Long lives in New York, according to her TikTok profile, but it’s unclear where she found the turtle last summer when this video originally went viral. After she asks the turtle how it’s doing, she tells it she wants to give it a little pet, and she goes in with her hand, still recording. The turtle snaps at her at breakneck speed, and she screams.
Someone in the background asks, “Did it get you?”
“Yeah,” she says, and then the video stops. Perhaps it’s not surprising that a snapping turtle snapped, but the sheer speed of this thing will make you want to watch multiple times.
Here’s why you don’t pet a snapping turtle:
Thankfully, Long is OK. She captioned her video: “Yes it hurt and yes I deserved it.”
A commenter asked to see her hand where Long was bit, and she obliged, sharing another TikTok video of her wound, which isn’t nearly as bad as you’d think.
Someone commented on that video: “been a fisherman all my life . . . I can safely say you are Very lucky that turtle didn’t take that thumb as a trophy 😳 Lol . .”
As a general rule, you shouldn’t pet, feed, or touch any wild animal. Anything with a mouth can bite, after all.