"The distorted version, perpetuated by Hollywood and popular treatments, falls more into the category of myth rather than fact. Promoting such fiction can actually have a negative impact on serious conservation efforts focused on preserving lions in the wild," Gnoske says.
Man-eating: A Social tradition
In a few well-documented, localized incidents, man-eating appears to be a learned behavior. Once lions establish a pattern and begin to prey regularly on humans, they can pass it on to their offspring, along with sophisticated strategies and techniques, such as never returning to the same place two days in a row.
"Lions are a social species, capable of transmitting a behavioural tradition from one generation to the next," Kerbis says. "The fact that they can be born and raised to hunt and eat humans means that an outbreak of man-eating usually does not stop until all the responsible lions and their offspring are eliminated."
Further supporting this view is the fact that man-eating incidents in Tsavo did not begin with the arrival of railway crews, nor did they end with the destruction of the notorious lion coalition. The authors document killings by lions in Tsavo for several years prior to the arrival of Col. Patterson. Killings continued regularly through WWI when soldiers were picked off on patrol. All of this points to a man-eating culture among Tsavo lions, a phenomenon rarely documented.
Unwittingly, man had fed this culture by "provisioning" Tsavo lions with dead humans. A famine of epidemic proportions on the heels of a severe small pox outbreak, local burial 'practices' and hundreds of Indian laborers, dead from disease, all helped supply the Tsavo lions with humans in the 1890s and encourage their attraction to humans as prey.
Historic caravans with slaves and porters regularly passed through Tsavo in the second half of the 19th century despi
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Contact: Greg Borzo
gborzo@fieldmuseum.org
312-665-7106
Field Museum
14-Jan-2003