There are plenty of videos from Yellowstone National Park involving tourists doing breathtakingly stupid things around wild animals.
This is not one of them.
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A man was seriously injured Friday evening after an agitated bull bison chased him through a campground and launched him several feet into the air in one of the wildest human-animal encounters you will ever see.
The attack happened at Bridge Bay Campground, south of Fishing Bridge, and was captured on video by professional photographer Mike MacLeod.
The unidentified man was reportedly walking with his grandson when the bison targeted them from roughly 100 yards away — well beyond the 25-yard minimum distance Yellowstone requires visitors to maintain from bison.
And the video makes it clear this animal was already looking for trouble.
Before the man and his grandson entered the picture, the bull had reportedly charged a group of children who were taking photos from a safe distance. The kids scattered, and the bison eventually stopped to wallow in a patch of dirt.
That is when the man and his grandson came around the corner, unaware of everything that had just happened.
“They were just out for an evening walk, just happened to turn around the corner, and there’s a bison,” MacLeod told Cowboy State Daily.
The pair initially stopped to take photos while the animal appeared to be resting. But when the bison started to stand, the grandfather recognized it was time to go, and the two moved behind a group of trees.
Then a white pickup truck drove past. For whatever reason, that apparently sent the bull right back over the edge.
“The bison was charging the truck,” MacLeod said. “The guy in the truck saw that happening, and he just kept going. The bison (then went) to where these two were hiding in the trees.”
The footage shows the enormous animal barrel into the trees as the man desperately tries to stay on the opposite side of the trunks. For a moment, the bison becomes distracted and takes its anger out on a small sapling.
But then it spots the man again.
The bull races after him, catches him with its horn and sends him flipping high into the air before he crashes onto his side.
“The bison hooked him with his left horn on his hip and tossed him in the air,” MacLeod said. “He made a perfect flip and landed on his side. The bison was at least 6 feet tall, and (the victim) was several feet above him.”
Even more terrifying, the bison does not immediately leave. Instead, it stands over the injured man, shaking its head while he remains on the ground.
MacLeod stopped recording and ran toward the animal, yelling and trying to draw its attention away from the victim. Several other witnesses followed his lead, and together they managed to scare the bison away.
“I was really afraid he was going to gore the guy on the ground, so I stopped videotaping and ran at the bison, yelled loud, and was trying to be as big and intimidating as possible,” MacLeod said.
Yellowstone EMS soon arrived and took over.
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MacLeod said he later spoke with the man’s grandson, who told him his grandfather “has some pretty significant injuries and is not out of the woods yet.”
The National Park Service had not released an official statement or an update on the man’s condition as of Sunday morning.
Again, this does not appear to be a case of someone walking up to a bison for a selfie, trying to pet it or otherwise ignoring every wildlife warning posted throughout Yellowstone.
MacLeod said people in the campground were keeping their distance and actively warning others as the agitated animal moved through the area.
“I didn’t see anybody getting close,” he said. “People were yelling, ‘Careful, there’s a bison coming through,’ and they kept their distance. They were very respectful.”
MacLeod added: “You can tell he was agitated, pissed off, and charging anything and everything.”
Bull bison can become especially aggressive during the annual rut, or mating season, which usually begins around late July. The animals may wallow, bellow, challenge rivals and become much less tolerant of anything they perceive as a threat.
The attack was Yellowstone’s second reported human-bison incident of 2026. A 12-year-old visitor was injured June 26 near Mud Volcano, north of Fishing Bridge. The National Park Service did not disclose the extent of that child’s injuries.
MacLeod has spent plenty of time around bison, but he said even he had never seen behavior quite like this.
“I’ve been around bison for a while, but this was really weird,” he said. “Why did it pick those two? There were so many people around, and most of them were closer to and behind the bison. It was really weird.”
Sometimes there is an obvious lesson after one of these encounters: Respect wild animals, follow the rules and do not risk your life for a photograph.
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This time, the man and his grandson appear to have done all of that.
They were simply in the wrong place at the exact moment a 2,000-pound animal decided to go ballistic.
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