The owner was apparently an exotic bird collector trying to breed them:Cassowary attack: giant bird kills owner in Florida after he fell
A man who owned and bred cassowaries in Florida fell and was killed by one of his birds. The article does not name the facility where the incident occurred, but it sounds like a private breeding center that is closed to the public. (Note the photo in the article is a wild cassowary in Australia and not one from the Florida facility). Large bird attacks and kills its fallen owner in Florida
I did a little bit of research and I found out that he owns Gateway Farms, which is a private breeding center. I'd resume this is where he was attacked by the Cassowary.
Knowing how lethal these birds can potentially be; I looked up recorded fatalities only a couple of weeks ago to see how many there had been. Until last week; there had only been one recorded fatality, and that was almost 100 years ago (a 16 year old man was killed in 1926). Sixteen-year-old boy killed by cassowary Though many humans have been seriously injured by cassowaries, there is only one recorded fatality. On April 6, 1926, brothers Philip and Granville McLean, 16 and 13, encountered a cassowary while retrieving a stray horse from a bushland property in Mossman, far-north Queensland. The boys' dog attacked the bird, and when Granville rushed in he was viciously kicked in the leg. Philip swung his horse's bridle at the bird, which chased him — and when the boy tripped and fell, the cassowary "jumped on him, its spike-like claw penetrating [his] neck" and severing his jugular. He stood and ran, but almost immediately collapsed and bled to death.
A story told to me by a higher ranked person from Jakarta Zoo was that some where in the 1950s - 1960s - 1970 the Jakarta Zoo had several Cassowary enclosure along the out-side fence of the Zoo and that one night a person tried to get into the zoo. It was found death the next morning in one of the Cassowary-pens and later it was found out that this person was an ex-convicted person and the zoo tried to stifle the whole affair.
There is further discussion about dangerous cassowaries in the link below: Are cassowaries really monster killer-birds that disembowel people?
I never worked with them in the collections I worked in, but worked alongside bird keepers that shared one of our kitchens at one zoo. They had cassowaries..nasty if upset. They used to use shields or pushboards to move them down a corridor to work around them..one keeper I worked with told of one gouging chunks out of a door with one kick Theres a really good scientific paper on the net, about problems with them and people interaction in Australia, apparently a big problem is people feeding them and the birds getting habituated and expecting it.. Jeez in the UK gulls are pushy and aggressive enough when hungry in tourist places..imagine a stubborn cassowary demanding food!!!
Who knows. The camera guy certainly didn't seem keen on the bird. The cassowary stood a lot more than I would have expected.
