On April 20, 1979, during a few days of vacation in his hometown of Plains, Georgia, Carter was fishing in a johnboat (sometimes erroneously described as a canoe) in a pond on his farm, when he saw a swamp rabbit, which Carter later speculated was fleeing from a predator, swimming in the water and making its way towards him, “hissing menacingly, its teeth flashing and nostrils flared”, so he reacted by either hitting or splashing water at it with his paddle to scare it away, and it subsequently swam away from him and climbed out of the pond. A White House photographer captured the subsequent scene. Carter was uninjured; the fate of the rabbit is unknown.