Angry Otter Attacks Boy, Grandma

A river otter attacked an 8-year-old boy and his grandmother as they were swimming in a park in Washington state yesterday morning. The boy's mother, Tabitha Moser, told King-TV that her own mother saved the boy from a worse fate in the Pilchuck River in the town of Machias. "All of a sudden I just heard him scream for his life," Moser said of her boy. "He was just bobbing up and down in the water and as he came up there was something all the way on top of his head."

"It followed us all the way up the river," she added, and continued biting her mother as Moser pulled her from the river. "Even after it got into the river and out of our way it stood up on its hind legs looking at us like, 'Don't do it again, don't come in here," she said. The boy was hospitalized with stitches and the grandmother underwent eye surgery that may lead to her losing the eye. State and federal wildlife agents are trying to trap the otter, saying it will likely be killed unless it is a female with pups. (More sea otter stories.)