A British man who barely survived getting attacked by an angry hippopotamus during a vacation in Zambia tells the BBC that he has no hard feelings towards the massive, semi-aquatic mammals despite the savagery visited upon him, but is also “not very fond of” what the hippo did to him.

“When the hippo first hit the canoe, there was a massive crash, much like a car crash really,” said 63 year-old Warwickshire man Roland Cherry, who first suffered a dislocated shoulder, rendering him unable to swim away from the behemoth before things got even more real in the June incident on the Kafue River in Zambia. “I remember surfacing, realizing my shoulder was quite badly injured and I realized I’d dislocated it from the outset and the consequences were that I couldn’t actually swim.”

“The instructions were to swim to safety but I couldn’t swim so I was really a sitting duck, trying to swim with one arm which was never going to end well – and then it grabbed me,” Cherry continued, adding that the beast dragged him down to the bottom of the river. “I do remember thinking ‘oh no, what a way to go… I’m not ready to die’ and this was it, because nobody survives hippo attacks.”

Cherry says the next thing he knew he was lying on the riverbank. “We know subsequently from fellow travelers I was grabbed again and thrown through the air like a rag doll but towards the bank which was the godsend,” he said. He ended up hospitalized in South Africa with a 10-inch (25cm) wound to his abdomen, a thigh injury, and dislocated shoulder, requiring seven surgeries. The nurses told him they never met a hippo attack survivor because, as Cherry said, nobody lives through it.