Ted Nugent's Self Defense Encounter
Stopping a Dangerous Animal Attack Like a Rock Star
Situation: You’re on the ground being crushed by 800 lbs. of horned, hoofed fury. Now, aren’t you glad you were carrying a powerful handgun?
Lesson: A gun not in immediate reach won’t save you. Something other than you might start the fight you’ll have to finish. Relevant practice and a determined will to live can both save your life. The gun you’re most familiar with is likely to be the one that works best for you under stress … and it helps to remember what you’re fighting for.
In today’s American argot, doing something spectacularly well is often articulated as “you did it like a rock star!” Let’s also consider that armed self-defense is not always applied to our own kind when they turn homicidal. Venomous things that slither, large felines and canines with fangs and claws, and huge enraged beasts with sharp hooves and even sharp horns can threaten human beings, even the ones who own and feed them.
Bring that all together, and you have the formula that created the incident we’ll share with you now. It involved an actual American rock star.
If the word association test was “rock star with guns,” the first answer most informed people would give would be “Ted Nugent.” They call him the “Motor City Madman.” He has delighted gun owners by being “One of Us,” like his music loud and strong for Second Amendment Rights. I first met him at my all-time favorite shooting match, Richard Davis’ Second Chance Shoot, where Ted competed back in the day. It’s now known as The Pin Shoot (PinShoot.com), ramrodded by Richard’s son Matt. I often see Ted at the NRA Annual Meetings.
Nugent is famous as a hunter, too. But few know that he once had to use a pistol to survive a deadly attack by a huge animal.
What follows is Ted’s story of the incident, as told to me in 2023. Total disclosure: It was originally for another magazine that went out of print. This is just as well, as we have more space for details here.
In His Own Words, Ted’s Story
A career in rock music has been good to me, good enough to allow me to indulge my passion for hunting all over the world and to own a ranch in Texas well-stocked with exotic game. I get to practice shooting almost every day. As a hunter I learned early to always have a powerful handgun on my person. When GLOCK introduced their first 10mm AUTO in 1990, I bought one and was hooked. I own half a dozen or more, from the little G29 to the long-barrel G40, but the one I bonded with and carry just about every day was the GLOCK 20. Its 16 rounds of deep-penetrating .40 caliber bullets made me retire the .44 Magnum I used to wear, and the G20 became my daily carry wherever I am with at least two spare 15-round magazines. I’m 6’2″ and 220 lbs., so it’s easy to conceal under an un-tucked, unbuttoned shirt discreetly.
About a decade ago, that habit and that GLOCK 20 saved my life.
I was doing my chores on my ranch, attending my trap line, with three of my dogs: Happy, a Catahoula Cur; Sadie, a little yellow Lab; and my German Shepherd Coco. We hunt squirrels every day, so my suppressed Ruger 10/22 rifle was along. I heard the dogs barking, thought they had a squirrel and headed toward the barking. But then, the sounds became a crescendo, which told me they were probably chasing a hog. I grabbed the .22 and ran through the woods toward the noise. But then the sounds turned into an animal screaming.
I ran through the forest and came to an opening, and there I saw Happy had a gemsbok calf down and screaming its head off. I laid the .22 down and crawled under the barbed wire fence. I was ready to grab Happy and pull him off the calf when I saw a dark blur rushing at me from my left.
I knew in an instant what it was and how dangerous it was. I have hunted the gemsbok in its native Africa, where they are known to kill lions with their spear-like horns … and I knew this particular animal because I owned it. The cow gemsbok weighed about 800 lbs., and she was an alpha of her kind. When a vehicle came by, the others would run, but she would stand truculently to face it. Now, she was coming at me, and I knew very well that she intended to kill whatever she perceived was harming her calf — which was me.
The Gemsbok Express
She hit me like a freight train. She was trying to skewer me with those long, sharp horns, but I was able to turn just enough that the points missed my torso, and her forehead hit me square in the chest, driving me back and down. In an instant, I was on the ground … but even as I was falling, my training and practice kicked in, and I was drawing the GLOCK from its leather Galco hip holster and already pulling the trigger. My first shot went off about the time my back hit the earth.
In the next few seconds, her head was rocketing back and forth, trying to stab me while I was down, but I was shooting right-hand only at the same time my left arm was trying to pull me back away from her along the ground. My legs were kicking furiously. Somehow, my subconscious managed to keep me from firing when my feet were in front of the muzzle.
With each shot, I could feel her slowing and weakening, but she was still trying to kill me, so I kept shooting. Everything seemed to go into slow motion. My dogs tried to rescue me, harrying her at her back legs. She swung toward them as if to skewer these new threats instead of me.
That bought me time to pull the gun up and point-shoot a one-handed shot at her head. I saw the bullet hit her jaw and knew it had missed the brain. She was sideways to me now, and I was finally able to see my front sight, and I put a couple through her ribs. She began to stumble.
I came upright, still on my butt. The slide was still closed, but I had lost count of my shots and didn’t know how many rounds I had left, so I quickly pulled a spare mag out of my pouch and reloaded. We were now 10′ apart. I took an aimed shot at her ear, and that killed her instantly.
I spent the next few minutes checking out myself and the dogs. We were OK. All I had were scrapes and bruises. The horns had torn my shirt on both sides but hadn’t hit the torso the maddened cow gemsbok was trying to spear.
I donated about 250 lbs. of prime gemsbok venison to the local soup kitchen. If I’d been carrying the .44 Magnum six-shooter of yesteryear, I think I would have been dead. My 16-shot 10mm GLOCK was loaded with urban defense loads, 150-grain JHPs at 1,300 foot-seconds. The side-to-side shots expanded and lodged under the hide on the opposite side, and the ones from the front went through the brisket but not deep enough into the internal organs as the hunting loads I later wished I’d had in the gun.
The GLOCK 20 saved my life and the lives of my dogs. So did the training and constant practice with that pistol. I believe God had a plan for me, and all those things came together, which is why I am here to tell you this story.
Analyzing The Details
Handguns for large game (usually bear) protection is a frequently discussed topic on the gun-related Internet, including a whole lot of posters who are unlikely to ever see a bear except in a zoo. Choices seem to evolve into four major categories. Some on one end of the bell curve ask, “What 9mm for bears?” occasionally citing a single very experienced bear guide who killed an attacking grizzly with a hard-cast Buffalo Bore 9mm specialty load or an outdoorsman who, when his companion panicked and dropped his shotgun, emptied a Taurus 9mm into the charging bruin in question and finally got a full metal jacket bullet into its brain. On the other end of the bell curve are those who insist on .500 Magnum, .460 S&W Mag, or at minimum .454 Casull, often ignoring recoil and hit potential elements.
Essentially, though, it breaks down to the choice Nugent dealt with: .44 Magnum six-shooter versus 16-shot 10mm Auto. And you’ve just read why Ted credits his survival to his selection of the latter.
Ted has killed thousands of animals, averaging a hundred head of big game a year since the early 1970s, including game ranch culls, control work at airports, and unlimited doe tags in Michigan. He estimates he has killed about a hundred large animals with 10mm pistols, including a cape buffalo.
The incident under discussion here with the gemsbok was not his first time dealing with a charging quarry, just the first time one made contact. Ted recalls, “In 1968, I was charged by a 150-lb. European-bred boar at a game preserve in Michigan. I was blood trailing it when it came out of a downfall. I had a 9mm loaded with 147-grain subsonic; it buckled at the first shot, and the second shot killed it.”
The cape buffalo was an aborted charge. Nugent relates, “For a TV show, I hit a cape buff in South Africa in 1999. The arrow got only one lung. We tracked it for hours. When the buff got up out of its bed and swung its head toward us, I put three rounds of 10mm Cor-Bon 190-grain Penetrators along its vertebrae quickly and dropped it.”
For a long time, Ted’s favorite carry load was the Cor-Bon 135-grain JHP, rated for 1,450 feet per second. “It worked well on kudu, zebra, impala, and a big waterbuck. It killed like I was shooting a .30-06. I used the 165-grain Cor-Bon on a big running elk, held under his nose, impacting the shoulder and rolled it as if it had been hit with a .338 Magnum rifle. The bullet went all the way to the far side. The 10mm Auto can give amazing handgun performance.”
When he carries his GLOCK 10mm on the ranch today, he says it’s loaded with Remington 200-grain CoreLokt. He told me, “That Remington load is a monster. It expands but punches very deep.” The 10mm GLOCK has been his daily carry for many years, hiding well under an un-tucked shirt. Nugent’s vast gun collection contains many GLOCK tens, from the little G29 to the 6″-barrel G40, but his rotating battery of 4.5″ barrel GLOCK 20s hit the sweet spot for him. He generally carries at least two spare 15-round magazines.
Nugent’s Opponent
The African gemsbok, also known as the Greater Oryx, is a large antelope with long, spear-like horns. Those of the female, I was told by the professional hunters when I stalked them in Namibia, tend to be longer, straighter and more spear-like than those of the male. Our native trackers called them “the devil’s riding horse” because they fight so ferociously to protect their young. I was also warned that they were tough critters that took a lot of lead to stop. I found that to be true. So did Ted Nugent, attacked by a specimen unusually large for its breed.
In The Moment
Long-time American Handgunner readers will recall that decades ago, this Ayoob Files feature grew out of a discussion in the Cop Talk column about the altered perceptions experienced by people during life-or-death encounters. Ted Nugent experienced many of those phenomena during the Gemsbok attack.
Tunnel vision. “I absolutely had tunnel vision,” he told me. “The whole world was down to me in a tunnel with her, nothing outside the tunnel. It may be why I was able to avoid shooting my own feet. I could see where my bullets were hitting her.”
Tachypsychia. FBI calls it “visual slowdown,” a perception of things happening in slow motion. “I really did have that slow-motion thing,” Ted relates. “I know how fast it must have been happening. Later, I figured out that from her first hit on me to when I turned her away, it was maybe five or six seconds, and from when she started toward me to when I put the final shot behind her ear, it was perhaps 12 seconds. But it seemed a whole lot longer while it was happening!”
Auditory exclusion. A full-power 10mm load has a sharp crack of a report, so much so that some find it objectionable even on the shooting range when wearing muffs. Shooting incident survivors often report that gunfire seemed muffled during the fight and occasionally don’t consciously hear the shots at all. We have something rather unique in this case: a man wearing hearing protection at the time of the shooting.
Ted explains, “A lifetime of hunting and shooting has left me with some hearing impairment. I put hearing aids in when I’m doing interviews. On that day, as always when I’m out and about on the ranch, I had Sonic Ear Valves in both ears. That’s because I know I’m probably going to be taking some shots of opportunity.”
He had the ear valves in place that day, which helps explain why he was in no way distracted by the sound of his own gunfire during the Gemsbok attack.
Life review. Ted told me, “You know how people say after something like this, ‘My life flashed before my eyes?’ That absolutely happened to me during the gemsbok attack. There was time to think of my wife, Shemane, our kids, and my grandkids. I thought for a moment, ‘Who’s gonna find my body?’”
Lessons
Don’t forget domestics. As with most such discussions, we’ve been looking so far at wild animal attacks. Just as the human attacker is sometimes a rogue member of the family or extended family, the animal attack sometimes takes the form of large livestock turning on the owner or handler. Elmer Keith wrote of how powerful sixguns saved him and others from maddened horses or enraged bulls. In Ted Nugent’s case, while the Gemsbok was wild, it still belonged to him. Then and now, his ranch occasionally hosts big game hunts. Ted figures the Gemsbok would have been worth about $10,000 to a paying hunting client. “Believe me,” he laughs now, “that thought actually went through my mind too for a fraction of a second while it was happening.” He didn’t let that deter him from performing the indicated response, and the same should be true if the attacking animal is a favorite horse or prize steer.
Being in shape is always advantageous. Ted was in his 60s and had recently had a double knee replacement at the time of the incident. Fortunately, he had remained extremely active. While he was acutely aware that he wasn’t as athletic as when he was younger, he had the stamina and the mental strength to stay in the fight and prevail.
Immediate availability. Having the 10mm right there on his hip saved his life. Anyone who has studied a lot of armed self-defense cases will confirm that only tools within immediate reach — which usually means on your physical person — can be counted on.
Remember what you’re fighting for. The single most important lesson in this case may come from that moment when Ted Nugent’s life flashed before his eyes. He thought of his wife, his children, and his grandchildren. There are many people who work for him and would lose their primary income if he ceased to live.
History shows us that we fight harder for those we love, for those who depend on us than we do for ourselves. It may be why our survival instinct sometimes makes our “lives flash before our eyes” when we stand at the brink of death and look down into the abyss.
It is something we would all do well to have in mind before we find ourselves on that brink.
