Man-eaters
I don’t like the look of this pair. They’ve spotted something, and there’s going to be trouble. Hopefully it’s not someone on foot or on a bicycle. Man-eating has been attributed to a shortage of natural prey, loss of habitat, and injured or sick animals. When lions become man-eaters, they teach their cubs to be man-eaters. In Tanzania and parts of Mozambique and Malawi, it has been noted that man-eating increases in the rainy season when the grass is long and pursuit of natural prey is more difficult.
We have all seen a cat stalk a bird or lizard. Imagine the same scene with a cat twenty times larger. That would be a female lion stalking its prey, patient and silent.
Anyone interested in the history of man-eaters in Africa should read Lieutenant Colonel JH Patterson’s book, The Man-eaters of Tsavo. For several months, the two lions held up the building of the Uganda railway through southeast Kenya until the author shot them. The film, The Ghost and the Darkness, also tells their story.
The greatest recorded incidence of man-eating in Africa was the fifteen-year reign, between 1932 and 1947, of the Njombe man-eaters in Tanganyika, now Tanzania. The entire pride were man-eaters, and over three generations, they were reputed to have killed around 1,500 people. Their story is told in TV Bulpin’s exciting book, The Hunter is Death.
There have been hundreds of other cases of man-eating, and many of them have gone unreported due to the remoteness of the areas where they have occurred. In recent times, with the illegal migration of Africans from Mozambique and Zimbabwe to South Africa, it is thought the incidence of man-eating is greater than ever. To avoid detection by the authorities, the illegal immigrants travel at night through the Kruger National Park. It is the very time when lions are most active. Some estimates put the annual number of human victims of man-eaters, in the northern part of the park, in their thousands. The Mozambican refugees tend to follow the power lines, and the lions lie there in wait for them. Rangers frequently come across the scattered belongings of refugees thought to be taken by lions.