Daily Photo – Cactus Garden in the Winter Glasshouse

Today I bring to you the cactus, which allows me to share a story that I can assure you is absolutely true and fits neatly into the “idiot has a gun” category.

In February 1982, an Arizona man and his friend headed out into the desert to engage in a little “cactus plugging”. For the uninitiated, cactus plugging is a rather simple activity. All you need is a gun and a giant cactus and, like many activities involving firearms and questionable decision-making, it generally goes well until it doesn’t.

On this occasion, the pair came across a cactus reported to be between seven and eight metres tall, which would have made it well over a century old. Now, the thing about this particular cactus that features in our story is that this type doesn’t grow arms until they’re around 70 years old, and the monstrous specimen the pair had chosen had side arms later estimated to weigh around 230 kilograms, making the cactus somewhere between 150 and 200 years old. Well, the pair happily fired away at the cactus, repeatedly shooting into the base, naturally weakening the trunk. When their target didn’t immediately fall, they continued firing in the hope of toppling the mighty beast.

What happened next, I can only imagine, was one of those moments in life when time seems to stand still while everything happens in slow motion. As they continued firing, one of the massive side arms suddenly broke free, falling directly on top of one of the men and pinning him to the ground. The now unstable cactus, no longer able to support its own enormous weight, then collapsed on top of him.

Faced with his friend being crushed beneath a giant cactus, the other man ran several miles for help, but by the time emergency crews reached the remote location, he was already dead.

There are, I imagine, countless ways to leave this world. Being flattened by a cactus in the Arizona desert, has to rank among the more unusual.