Animals we should fear - Turtles

I have a private little (but only imaginary) collection of favorite nightmare animals. Of course, I don’t talk about my collection to a lot of people. They could take advantage of this information and use it against me like I did with my friend who has arachnophobia. I used to tell him my nightmares of spiders falling from trees on my head and they got tangled in my hair and... Are you still there?

Now my secret collection has a new member.
I always thought turtles are cute but a little bit boring. They have this round shell and those stubby legs and the little archaic head coming out or disappearing when they’re scared.

Yesterday, I had to revise my cute-turtle opinion. We went to an aquarium and they displayed a huge turtle that lives in rivers of the United States such as the Mississippi or even in parts of the southern Midwest (I’m about to convince my husband to move further north, like Canada or Alaska).  I always wondered why nobody took advantage of those nice and peaceful rivers. In Switzerland, we swim in every more or less usable water hole. But here, rivers or lakes are mostly untouched.

So, when we stood there in front of the huge tank, the first thing jumping to my mind was ‘Why do they display a dead turtle in a water tank?’ Maybe they couldn’t find a live one. They did it with corals and other underwater plants. Why not with a turtle?
The glass usually magnifies the size of animals in the tank. That made the turtle the size of a four or five year old kid. It didn’t move and it looked like the result of a love match between a dinosaur and an alligator. Its back was covered with long spikes and the beak-shaped mouth was wide open.
No life sign! The eyes were also open but never moving. This thing was definitely dead!
If I’d seen this creature in my neighborhood river I would have poked it. Maybe I would have taken it home or tried to sell it on Craigslist.

As you might have guessed by now, the thing was NOT dead.
Have you ever seen the movie “Child’s Play”? Do you remember when Andy’s mom doesn’t believe that the doll Chucky is alive? She checks the battery box, which of course is empty, and in that moment Chucky turns its head and says, “Hi! I’m Chucky. Wanna play?” 
Yeah, that’s how I felt when that thing suddenly moved its head an inch to the side after half an hour. By the way, my finger would have been missing if I’d really met the alligator snapper turtle in real and tried to fumble it. This thing from the river is one of the oldest creatures living in freshwater and has a very, very, very strong jaw. 

I will gladly add the alligator snapper turtle to my secret collection of nightmare animals.

And for the nostalgic ones, here is the clip from the famous Chucky moment: Chucky's Alive!