Favorite ARK moment...

I'm a pretty new player--I only just got my copy about a week ago from a friend. After stumbling around for a few hours and reading the wiki, I decided I wanted to try out this "taming" thing on the easiest critter I could find, which happened to be a dodo.

The tame went swimmingly. I had a pet! I spent some time playing with the commands and running along the beach with my new doofy companion. All my dreams realized. Unfortunately, I hadn't quite worked out the aggression settings.

I foolishly tried to whack a Parasaur to harvest some food, and it of course bolted away at high speed. Unfortunately, my dodo bolted with it. I tried whistling commands, which seemed ineffective, and then vaguely hoped it would eventually give up chasing something so much larger and faster than it once it got far enough away from me.

It....didn't. I took off down the beach and finally managed to catch up to my raging dodo. I picked it up to take it back to home base, and about halfway through the walk back decided I should set it down and mess with its follow/aggro settings to make sure it stuck by me.

I'm still new to this game and kind of clumsy with the controller, and within seconds I've accidentally set my dodo not to passive but aggressive, and it immediately leaps at the nearest enormous turtle hanging out on the beach. The turtle makes quick work of my poor dodo, before I can pull it away to somewhere safe. I hold a small funeral on the beach as the sun sets.

Unfortunately, this seems to be a trend. The next time I tame something--this time a parasaur--I carefully set all of its aggro/follow settings and start leading it back home (I thought I could ride it, but it turns out I had a promotional parasaur saddle skin, not a saddle itself, whoops). Once again we're about halfway home, when a dilophosaurus jumps out of the undergrowth, attacks not the parasaur but a nearby turtle, which my parasaur gets stuck on a rock right next to, and while defending itself from the dilophosaur the turtle also attacks my parasaur....which promptly dies. I'm on a local server so I frantically try fiddling with resetting the server to no avail. She was lost for good. Another tame lost to those damn turtles.

Despite all this I'm still having a good time...but I'm not taming anything else until I clear my whole beach of turtles and can saddle-and-ride my next dino to safety.