Wild animals under normal circumstances do not pose a threat to humans. Quite the opposite. Whatever the species, they invariably move away as soon as they see a human. Lions, elephants, buffalo – even crocodiles when encountered on dry land – move away at our approach. Some, including lions, even flee. This doesn’t say much for humans. Significantly, they do not shy away from other species – buck will graze quite close to resting lions. The fact that animals in the wild will flee at our approach is not, however, an immutable rule and it could be fatal to assume so. The problem is that, these days, ‘normal circumstances’ do not prevail over much of Africa. We have to sow crops and so we attract herbivores; we have to have livestock and so we attract carnivores and, as Africa’s human population grows, we have to establish villages and towns and invade the habitats of other large species – some bigger and toothier than we are – and so a conflict situation arises. The more clumsily these conflicts are managed, the worse the consequences for both animals and humans.
Many overseas tourists have a perception of wildlife heavily influenced by television programmes such as Mad Mike and Mark who, in the African wilds, perform flamboyant and pointless antics, getting perilously close to dangerous animals, seemingly to show off like circus lion tamers who put their heads in lions’ mouths. Other programmes depict wild animals in an anthropomorphic way, often insinuating there can be a sort of Doctor Dolittle bond between humans and wildlife. Their naivety can be chilling.
A few years ago some Southeast Asian students driving in a South African lion park saw a group of lions; two of the students got out of their vehicle and casually walked over to them to pose for photographs. One was instantly killed. In 2000 I was driving a Hungarian visitor in the Kruger Park and stopped because there were elephants in the road. My guest leapt out of the car and ran towards the elephants gesticulating for me to take his picture. Fortunately the elephants fled.
This naivety about bonding with wild creatures was epitomised in 2003 in Alaska when Timothy Treadwell (46) and his girlfriend, Amie Huguenard (37), were killed and partially eaten by a grizzly bear or bears near Kaflia Bay in Katmai National Park, about 480 kilometres (300 miles) southwest of Anchorage. Treadwell, a popular self-styled ‘eco warrior’, would on Discovery Channel, get up close and unarmed to bears and call out, ‘I love you.’ The couple decided to camp in bear country to prove the point that bears would not harm you if you did not harm them. Soon after the tragedy a man was witnessed in the same national park luring bears with food offerings and then whacking them with a stick. He explained, ‘I’m teaching them that humans are bad.’
Equally hard to live with is the other extreme epitomised by that segment of the hunting safari industry catering for redneck American hunters, whose holy grail is to hunt in Africa. It was revealing to see their reaction when a cyclist was killed by a mountain lion (cougar) in Orange County, California, in January 2004 and a young woman hiker was dreadfully mauled by the same cat. Many people felt the lion should not have been shot. This sentiment incensed the hunting fraternity’s Smith & Wesson Forum on the Internet, which carried many vitriolic comments describing such people as ‘weirdos’, ‘commies’, ‘perverts’, ‘liberals’ and, presumably the worst of all, ‘anti-gun lobbyists’! One hunter said he’d never enter a national park without a side arm. This would certainly bar him from entering any African national park that I know of.
Yet even highly knowledgeable people can overlook the unpredictability of animals. Daphne Sheldrick of Animal Orphanage fame in East Africa reared an elephant and set it free. Years later she came across the elephant with a new calf. She walked up to it, calling its name, and then touched it. It hurled her aside, breaking her hip.
In fact, there are more positive stories of humans making friends with potential man-killers than there are negative ones, for instance Joy Adamson and her friendly lions in East Africa and her estranged husband, George, and his friendly lions in northeast Africa. Ironically both Joy and George met their deaths at the hands of humans – both were murdered in Africa. Patently, we can make friends with lions when they are brought up on the bottle, even romp with them; we can tame African elephants enough to ride on their backs. But in the wilds no bond exists between us and them. Wild animals in general live in fear of humans and even the sable antelope, tsessebe and giraffe have been known to attack, lethally, out of defence.
Nature is neutral. As John Burroughs (1837–1921) wrote, ‘Nature does not care whether the hunter slays the beast or the beast the hunter. She will make good compost of them both and her ends are prospered whichever succeeds.’
While every continent has its share of dangerous wild animals, some places are more dangerous than others; the most dangerous place on Earth is that vast ocean of golden savanna on the eastern side of Central Africa. It is significant that for well over three centuries this area was traversed by caravans of Arab slaves being escorted in chains to the coast, for shipment and sale in Eurasia and the Americas. Every year thousands were left dead and dying along the route, to be eaten by wild animals. During the 19th century the East African slave trade grew enormously, due to the demands for slaves by plantation owners in the French, British and Portuguese colonies. The slave traders penetrated into Malawi, and their southern routes leading back to the coast converged on Lindi on the Indian Ocean in southern Tanzania and on Sofala (Beira) in northern Mozambique.
Between 1501 and 1820 slave traders took 8.7 million Africans in chains to the western hemisphere. In the 68 years before the final abolition of slavery (Brazil was the last country to set its slaves free, in 1888) 2.3 million more were transported. A total of 11 million men and women came from Africa – 70 per cent owned by either British or Portuguese traders. An unknown proportion came from the central-eastern side of Africa. They were shackled together in small groups sometimes attached by iron collars. If any showed signs of exhaustion, they were abandoned to their fate and even hacked from the chain and left by the wayside. Nobody will ever know how many died along these routes, but it seems likely that, over the centuries of the slave trade, carnivores in those regions developed a taste for human flesh, which they retain to this day. The situation has been aggravated by bodies lying around after internecine wars and the custom among some communities, even today, of leaving their dead and, in the recent past, even their dying in the bush, to be consumed by carnivores. That region, that knot of countries embracing northern Mozambique, southern Tanzania, Malawi and eastern Zambia, has more problems than anywhere else in the world regarding conflict between wild animals and humans. There seems to be a genetic predisposition among the big carnivores in the region to seek human meat.
Man-eating hyaenas, uncommon outside this region, became a particular nuisance in southern Malawi around the mid 20th century and the Royal Air Force based in what was then Nyasaland was asked to bomb their caves in the Mount Mlanje region. They remain man-eaters to this day. Lions and leopards still frequently take humans in this region.
Coincidentally perhaps, baboons and chimpanzees in this same area have been known to kill and eat children.
Other casualties in the region result chiefly from attacks by elephants, hippopotamuses and crocodiles. Snakes take a steady toll as they do throughout the barefoot world. Another of this region’s bizarre records is that here was the biggest toll taken by a mammal in one go – a rhino is said to have charged a file of 21 slaves chained together by their necks impaling a person near the centre of the line and breaking the necks of the others1. But I wonder if this is not an urban legend.
Of all potentially dangerous animals, snakes are by far the biggest killers. The next in the order depends on the region but will always include hippos, crocodiles, lions, hyaenas or elephants. The Nile crocodile is probably the most persistent man-eater throughout Africa (as opposed to man-killer). W. Robert Foran, one of Africa’s more famous big-game hunters in the first half of the 20th century, felt that crocodiles kill and eat more people than any other large animal2. Jeremy Anderson tends to agree, saying that this is certainly so in Mozambique. It is probably so in South Africa.3
Of the world’s five big cats (tiger, lion, leopard, mountain lion and jaguar), the tiger in Asia was probably the bigger danger in the recent past and was eating as many as 2 000 people a year throughout the first half of the 20th century. Pro rata the tiger in India, even though it is becoming rare, takes a disproportionate number of humans compared with the more numerous lion in Africa because, I believe, tigers are presented with more opportunities and Indians have fewer firearms; in addition, Indians seem to have a more fatalistic attitude towards man-eaters. The Gir Forest lions in western India – the only lions left in Asia – seem far more inclined to eat humans than lions in Africa.
African hunters refer to ‘the big five’, which refers to the five most dangerous and sought-after big-game animals – the elephant, buffalo, rhinoceros, lion and leopard. The rhinoceros refers specifically to the rather maligned 1.5-tonne black rhino (Diceros bicornis) and not to the much heavier, 2.5-tonne white rhino (Ceratotherium simum), which is generally less aggressive4. The hippo, a formidable animal and a notorious man-killer, is not included among the big five because it is not considered a ‘game’ animal – ‘game’ denoting creatures desired by recreational hunters.
There is an interesting divergence of opinion regarding which of the big five is the most dangerous to hunt. The late George Rushby, a hunter of renown, found lions were ‘dull stuff in comparison to elephants’5. Major H.C. Maydon, one of the most experienced hunters in Southern Africa in the early 20th century, stated, ‘The elephant is by far the most dangerous beast to tackle.’6
Advances in rifle and ammunition technology have changed perceptions regarding which is the more dangerous to hunt. Most 19th-century hunters would certainly have declared elephants as the most dangerous quarry but the modern rifle has considerably lessened the chances of the hunter being killed. During the 20th century hunters such as Bronsart Von Schellendorff, Denis D. Lyell, E.A. Temple-Perkins, and John F. Burger were citing lions as the most dangerous. Foran, who hunted all ‘big seven’7 around the mid 20th century, considered the tiger and the African elephant equally dangerous and placed them above the lion. C.J.P. Ionides, who did a great amount of shooting in Africa, put the leopard on top, as do a few other hunters. They argue that, if you mess up your first shot with an attacking leopard, you rarely get a chance for a second because it is small and very fast and it comes low against the ground. The records contradict these hunters.
Jeremy Anderson, who during control work in recent years has had to shoot both lions and elephants in large numbers, suggests the fairest way to assess which is the most dangerous African wild animal is to consider the numbers of hunters killed by that species and the frequency with which that species is hunted8. His formula reveals the lion to be the more dangerous. Anderson cites colleagues who have shot up to 2 000 elephants in culling operations without injury yet, although very few lions have to be hunted in wildlife management operations, death and injury from lions crop up fairly frequently.
The hunting fraternity’s views regarding the relative dangers of hunting grizzlies or tigers, lions or elephants will depend, not only on the period, but also the type of terrain in which the hunters operate. Somebody hunting elephants in Africa’s savanna country would feel a great deal more confident than somebody hunting elephants in a forest. Surprisingly, no professional hunter rates the African buffalo as the most dangerous yet, as the chapter on buffalo will reveal, it can be a formidable and cunning adversary that has killed many hunters.
Reports of hunters killed by their quarry and the Anderson formula would suggest that the most dangerous animals to hunt are (in descending order): lion, elephant, buffalo, rhino (both species together) and leopard.
There is also a tendency among a few latter-day big-game hunters to make hunting sound more dangerous than it really is in order to justify what they do. As has already been stated, the big five are normally passive animals if left alone and are quick to retreat. And none under normal circumstances would stand a chance against a well-placed bullet fired from a modern firearm.
Aside from the hazards facing hunters, Louis Leakey, the Kenyan palaeo-anthropologist, suggested towards the end of his days that the big cats generally avoid humans because of our repulsive smell. He argued at a press conference in New York in 1967 that ‘nature endowed us with something of either a nasty taste or smell where the carnivores are concerned’. It is far more likely that our smell became repulsive to the big cats only after we had established ourselves as a dangerous species and generally as not terribly nice creatures. Since man first flung a stick or a stone at an animal, he has been preoccupied with weapons. To survive, he had to be a smart hunter with a smart weapon. By the time the Stone Age was in full swing, not even the biggest creatures on Earth were safe from this bold little hunter. The first Americans – 15 000 to 12 000 years ago – drifted in from the Asian steppes using the temporarily exposed Alaskan Land Bridge. Armed only with stone-headed spears, they killed four-tonne mastodons and mammoths. These now-extinct North American pachyderms may have felt no reason to retreat from these puny Asians with their funny little sticks – the first humans they had seen – and so they paid the price for failing to adapt to new circumstances. As humans migrated down the Americas, so they extinguished the megafauna; this spelled the end of the large scavengers that had depended on their remains as a food source – the dire wolf, the giant hyaena and others. The sole survivor into the 21st century is the condor vulture.
In most parts of the wilds, the faintest whiff of humans now triggers a fear response in the mightiest of creatures. But I don’t think Louis Leakey was right about our ‘nasty taste’. There are indications that, once a lion has killed its first human (usually accidentally, such as when a herdsman gets in the way of a predator that was stalking his cattle or sheep), it finds the taste agreeable. Having once tasted a human, a lion might well attack again and become addicted. Some man-eating lions have chalked up an extraordinary toll and have weaned their cubs on human flesh for several generations.
At Swartkrans – a hominid fossil site 40 kilometres (24 miles) northwest of Johannesburg – there is evidence that the first human species, Homo habilis, knew the controlled use of fire as early as 1.4 million years ago9. It surely would not have taken man very long to discover that generally animals are nervous of fire and for him to have used it to keep the big cats at bay. There’s little doubt that Homo used fire to drive animals over cliffs or into pit traps and cul-de-sacs.
But the use of an ordinary camp fire to keep away wild animals is overrated. In the wilderness of America and the bush of Africa, camp fires are usually not only ineffective in keeping the really dangerous animals away, but sometimes even attract them. In Africa the hippopotamus and the black rhinoceros have both been known to charge camp fires. In the United States grizzly bears have deliberately charged camp fires and mauled campers sitting around them. There are many instances of man-eating lions and tigers snatching up victims sleeping around a fire, and there are cases in Central Africa where hyaenas have, with one hasty bite, torn off the food-smeared faces or hands of people sleeping beside fires.
The infamous pair of man-eating lions of Tsavo, which killed so many people in 1898 and 1899, disregarded fire. Almost nothing would stop them once they had selected their victim, not even firebrands hurled at them. In fact, they were so disdainful of fire that they ate some of their victims in the light of it.
Big-game hunter John Taylor, who had a great deal of experience in Central Africa, found fires useless but swore that his 300-candlepower storm lantern was effective – ‘even the most determined man-eater would never venture into the dazzling blaze of light’10.
Oddly, the sound of a human voice has been enough to frighten off dangerous animals. In a magnificently pedantic work, the Reverend J.G. Wood refers to ‘a certain Mr. Cumming’ caught by a wounded lion saying to it, ‘Take it easy!’ The lion dropped him and fled11. Richard Perry says, ‘Man’s noise was particularly upsetting [to the tiger] and noise is the one deterrent that will keep the most confirmed man-eaters at bay.’12 When at night lions walked into the vegetable garden of Colonel James Stevenson-Hamilton, warden of the Kruger Park from 1902 to 1946, he would go outside and, in his high piping voice shout ‘Shoo!’ (and, no doubt, other words) to get rid of them13.
Africans resort to shouting to keep lions, hippos, elephants and wild pigs off their crops at night, and there are instances when shouts have turned charging rhinoceroses. Clapping too can help. In 2008 Alan Calenborne was in the Okavango where the inhabitants spend a great deal of their time on the water in mekoro (dugout canoes), fishing and cutting papyrus for their huts. He recalls:
One can be quite vulnerable in these dugouts because all you have is a pole for propulsion and that’s pretty slow especially when in the vicinity of an aggressive hippo or croc. We were confronted by a bull elephant in a channel which we had to get through. He refused to move but was not aggressive. We were told to start clapping our hands quickly, upon which the elephant immediately moved off. I’d never experienced this before, but was told that this was a common and safe practice used in the delta.14
South African farmer R. de la B. Barker, writing in African Wild Life magazine many years ago, told how one of his African workmen turned a buffalo nine times in succession by screaming at it. Big male baboons will repulse a hunting leopard in the same way. Ian Player, who was for many years wildlife conservator in Zululand, was with a group of editors in Umfolozi Game Reserve (now part of Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park) when a white rhino charged. There was one tree and, while the editors stood one behind the other behind the tree, Player stood his ground and shouted, ‘Voetsek!’, a South African word meaning ‘Scram!’ that seems to be universally recognised by most animals. The rhino veered away15.
Most animals have predictable flight-or-fight distances – the distance at which they decide whether to flee or take aggressive action. F.J. Pootman, writing of his experiences 60 to 70 years ago, calculated these distances and came to the conclusion that lions retreat when a person gets to within 80 metres (87 yards), elephants at 150 metres (164 yards) (in open country) and crocodiles at 150 metres when discovered out of water. He said most antelope rush off at about 20 metres (22 yards). This last one, if it were accurate for those days, which I doubt, certainly no longer applies.16
Flight distances depend on many factors. In game reserves where animals feel safe they can have the flight distance of cattle if approached by a vehicle. Outside protected areas most antelope flee at 200 metres (220 yards) and in hunted areas at 300 to 400 metres (328 to 437 yards).
It is interesting to consider why Africa’s megafauna – its elephants and rhinos and many herd species – did not go into the same cataclysmic decline experienced by, for instance, the bison of America and the saiga antelope of the Steppes, both of which were reduced to small remnant herds because of uncontrolled hunting. I believe it is because the wildlife of Africa saw man evolve from the rock-throwing australopithecine (apeman) through to Homo (true humans) and, as humans developed more and more efficient weapons, so the animals increased their flight distances and survived. Only when the long-range firearm appeared on the scene did the continent’s wildlife experience wanton slaughter17. It soon resulted in the extinction of the blue buck (Ozanna leucophaea) of the oryx family, the zebra-like quagga (Equus quagga) and the Cape lion (Leo leo melanochaitus), all of which were shot out in South Africa in the 19th century.
A course in a Mpumalanga college for prospective game rangers or ecologists offers advice on what distances various wildlife species will remain and not feel threatened once they become aware of one’s presence18. To move to within a certain distance will cause an animal to display displacement activity – just as a domestic cat (or even a lion) when uncertain about a situation will pretend to groom itself while deciding what action to take. An elephant will make as if it is feeding and then, as you draw closer into its flight-or-fight zone, it will decide whether to attack or flee.
The hippopotamus, throughout its range, has been indicted as Africa’s most predictably dangerous mammal. As humans encroach on its habitat, the hippo is coming more and more into conflict with people. The Nile crocodile too, as more and more people encroach on its habitat, is taking a considerable toll and individual crocodiles, having found humans easy to catch, begin specialising in man-eating. In one small dam in South Africa’s Limpopo Province, crocodiles killed 11 villagers in 200219.
In many parts of Africa, refugees from flood and famine, but mostly from conflict, have fallen prey to predators. How ironic that humans, under certain circumstances, feel safer among lions than among their own kind. Unknown numbers of African refugees have been killed by predators as a result.
Even while writing these words, I received reports of attacks within a morning’s drive from where I live, on the northern edge of Greater Johannesburg. In a matter of weeks there were five attacks by elephants on staff and visitors in reserves, resulting in four deaths. There were three attacks on villagers by hippos, of which two were fatal; a tourist was killed by a lion; a youngster was dragged from his tent and killed by a hyaena; another youngster was killed and partly eaten by a leopard near the busy staff village at Skukuza, the Kruger Park’s main camp. Similar incidents in undeveloped parts go unreported, not the least reason being that they are so commonplace. In particular, human deaths are increasing from encounters with animals such as elephants and buffalo left wounded by poachers.
Until just over 20 years ago I knew of no instances of man-eating involving leopards in South Africa. Yet, since the 1990s, five staff members in the Kruger Park have been killed and partially eaten by leopards. This was probably the result of leopards becoming used to human flesh, after encountering weakened and starving refugees fleeing neighbouring Mozambique’s civil war towards the end of the 20th century crossing through the park at night. An unknown number of these refugees were eaten – mainly by lions.
In parts of Africa north of the Limpopo River, where law and order periodically tend to break down, poachers wielding AK47s – the Russians’ shameful legacy to Africa – have greatly reduced the numbers of herbivores, and as a consequence predators sometimes renew their interest in their one-time natural prey – humans. Several FAO researchers referred to the way chronic political instability in Africa impedes conservation and how there have been 30 wars and 200 coups d’état since the 1970s. ‘As a consequence 500 million light weapons are readily accessible’ – one gun for every two people in Africa or several for each male adult. The availability of guns enables villagers such as those living around Chad’s Zakouma National Park to supply neighbouring towns and cities with bushmeat.
No wild animal is entirely predictable. The giraffe, for instance, despite being a singularly placid and timid beast, has been responsible for a few fatal incidents. In May 2010 a giraffe killed 25-year-old Merike Engelbrecht on a game farm in the Mopane district near Musina, just south of the Limpopo River. One of her dogs had menaced a female with a calf and Engelbrecht, in trying to control the dog, was kicked and died instantly of a broken neck. In June 2002 an American visitor, James Gregory, was killed by a blow to the head from a giraffe at the Aberdare Country Club north of Nairobi. James Drysdale, manager of the club, said a ranger had been killed there by a giraffe a few years earlier. I recall an incident on the Mombasa– Nairobi road 40 years ago, when a giraffe put its giant forefeet through the windshield of an approaching car, killing the driver instantly (giraffe when defending their young kick out with their front legs).
Once we realise just how many cases there are each year where people are killed by wild animals, we get an inkling of what it must have been like before we were adequately armed against our natural enemies and without medicines to fight infections from wounds – yet we successfully competed with large predators for food.
Some authorities have argued that only Homo sapiens’ capacity for reproduction saved our species from being extinguished by predators and insect-borne diseases. I don’t believe that our successful genesis was because of our ability to reproduce – nor in fact was it because we were ‘born killers’ as Raymond Dart20 and Robert Ardrey21 have suggested. We survived on the African savanna because our single most important talent is our ability to cooperate. In some respects we behave like herd animals, looking out for each other. Cooperation was the secret of our survival in Africa, where the first humans evolved and from where they eventually migrated across the world. We hunted in highly organised packs, with weapons fashioned by highly skilled craftsmen, and while on the hunt we had the ability to plan tactics and communicate by complex signals and vocalisations. Beyond a pack of wild dogs there’s no animal quite as determined and intelligent as a group of humans hunting something down.