Once again, the Mystery of the Tsavo Lions Solved

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I’ll never forget my first lion.

A colleague and I had just arrived in the Semliki Valley, in the Congo, to a part of that valley then known as the most predator-rich region of Africa, with loads of lions and heaps of hyenas. Lots of leopards too. We arrived at the main base camp for a large expedition that I was to join a year later (this was a brief visit) and were told to find the satellite camp, out in the bush.

“Ten clicks that way, then a left on their road. Good luck finding the road.”

Good luck indeed. Took us forever. And, at one point, after night fell, we had the brilliant idea that we could stand on the hood of of the Land Rover and maybe see lights in the distance (this turns out to have been totally worthless, as the camp was down in a valley, very far away, they mainly had candle light, and by this time only a single hurricane lamp would be burning, invisible from this distance).

So, we stopped, and I got out of the Land Rover, climbed up on to the hood, and just before the driver switched off the headlights, a giant lioness walked up to the truck, right in the headlight beams, looked at me, sniffed at the grill of the truck, and wandered off into the blackness of night, now invisible to us.

She was was about ten feet tall, fifty feet long, and had fangs about a foot long.

OK, I’m exaggerating slightly, but here’s the thing. You see a giant cat, like a lion or tiger, in a zoo, in the enclosure, and that’s one thing. You see a giant cat in the wild, a wild giant cat, not a tame one, and it is close enough to reach over and take your leg off without going anywhere, and that’s a different thing.

That was not to be my first close call with lions, nor the closest in fact, over the next year and a half. And, though I was not eaten by a lion, something like six people were, right near that spot.

Between this short trip and the later, much longer visit to this site, a lion, it is said, started eating people. It was local villagers, living in the usual wattle and daub grass-roofed huts who were being eaten. Lions tend to go for the head region when they kill, but they usually attack much more robust prey, like a large antelope or a buffalo. So, when the take a human, they may crush the head in such a way that an eye ball or two pops out. I was told that in a few of the locations where the lion ate someone, all that was left was an eye ball or two, and that freaked the freaken heck out of the people in those tiny villages.

I was told this by a local Greek merchant named Andre, who happened to be the guy with the biggest and most accurate firearm in the region, who, with his brother, took out the lion. Andre was wearing a nice neckless he had made himself, using one of the canines of the lion. His brother, he told me, had a matching neckless.

So, what about Tsavo? You may remember “The Ghost And The Darkness,” which was a book and a movie, or you may have heard about them from another source. It is an old story.

Back when the British were building a railroad across what is now Kenya, during much of the year 1898, two lions took to dining on the mostly Chinese rail workers. The number of victims they are said to have eaten ranges up to 135 people (see: The Man-Eaters of Tsavo and Other East African Adventures), and the lions were said to be mysterious and demonic. The reality is a bit different. They are known to have eaten 28 railway workers, and they were just regular lions, but of the mainless variety found in that region.

Lions, like cats generally, tend to be specialists. The way to find, trap, and kill (and sometimes, to process or eat) a particular species involves a lot of important detail. They way a Zebra vs. a Buffalo can kick you to death if you are a lion matters. The way to entrap a Ugandan kob vs. a wildebeest are not even close to the same thing, if you are a lion. Lions, therefore, tend to hunt a particular prey, or a small number of possible prey type, for a long time, possibly their entire lives.

Putting this a different way, the list of prey lions are known to have fed on is long. The list of species you actually observe a given pride of lions to feed on, if you watch most of their kills for many months, is very short. Humans are totally on the long list, and of all the wild mammals that kill humans in Africa, lions kill the most. But humans are rarely on the sort list. Why? Because they taste bad to lions, right? That’s what everyone says. Unfortunately, that is not true. We taste just fine, if a bit stringy. But we are bad prey for other reasons. First, we are rare. Yes, yes, seven billion is a lot, but in lion country, we are rare. Second, we live inside hard to get into nests much of the time, so it is not really worth it. Third, lions are not idiots. We have sharp weapons and sometimes guns, so even if a lion can easily sneak up on a human, some other human is going to stick or shoot you. In any event, once a lion starts to eat humans, it does not live too long. The Tsavo lions probably lived longer than the average man eater. The Semliki man eater emerged on the scene, ate some people, and was dispatched between my visit in late August and my return the following June.

But there is some new research telling us a few cool things. Here’s the paper:

DeSantis, L.R.G. and B. D. Patterson. 2017. Dietary behaviour of man-eating lions as revealed by dental microwear textures. Scientific Reports 7, Article number: 904 (2017) doi:10.1038/s41598-017-00948-5.

Here is the abstract:

Lions (Panthera leo) feed on diverse prey species, a range that is broadened by their cooperative hunting. Although humans are not typical prey, habitual man-eating by lions is well documented. Fathoming the motivations of the Tsavo and Mfuwe man-eaters (killed in 1898 in Kenya and 1991 in Zambia, respectively) may be elusive, but we can clarify aspects of their behaviour using dental microwear texture analysis. Specifically, we analysed the surface textures of lion teeth to assess whether these notorious man-eating lions scavenged carcasses during their depredations. Compared to wild-caught lions elsewhere in Africa and other large feliforms, including cheetahs and hyenas, dental microwear textures of the man-eaters do not suggest extreme durophagy (e.g. bone processing) shortly before death. Dental injuries to two of the three man-eaters examined may have induced shifts in feeding onto softer foods. Further, prompt carcass reclamation by humans likely limited the man-eaters’ access to bones. Man-eating was likely a viable alternative to hunting and/or scavenging ungulates due to dental disease and/or limited prey availability.

You need to know that at Tsavo, at that time, the prey was very reduced in frequency because of a drought and the rinderpest. So some lions were probably desperate. In the case of Tsavo, one lion had a tooth problem, which may have made killing larger and more formidable prey difficult, and the other lion was apparently its friend and went along with it. (Male lions do form such small teams.) Other research at Tsavo indicated that these lions had eaten more people than recorded by the railroad, so they may have been eating humans for a while, though not their entire adult lives.

There are two other writeups on this work you will want to check out:

Virginia Morell, “Why did these lions eat 35 men?

Bem Giaromp “Why did the Tsavo lions eat people?

See also: Michael Torrice, “A body count for two man-eating lions

Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:

In Search of Sungudogo by Greg Laden, now in Kindle or Paperback
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10 thoughts on “Once again, the Mystery of the Tsavo Lions Solved

  1. Greg, a number of years ago a buddy and me were hiking up Cascade Canyon in Grand Teton National Park. We came around a corner and there was a black bear standing in the trail. Of course the rule in bear country is always hike with someone slower than you are. My buddy at the time was running marathons and was gone like a shot. I scrambled up into the rocks and the bear walked within ten feet below me.

    There’s more to the story but we made a bear report at the ranger station and one questions was what we estimated the weight of the bear to be. We estimated 300 to 350 pounds.

    A week later in the Idaho Falls paper they reported that the park service had removed nuisance bear from Cascade Canyon that weighed 98 pounds. That bear sure had a wonder diet between when we reported it and it was removed,

  2. “She was was about ten feet tall, fifty feet long, and had fangs about a foot long.”

    A young one then? 🙂

    When my older son was in first grade they had a field trip to a local zoo. I helped shepard a group of kids with another son’s mother. The zoo was raising a leopard cub, and the kids could look in a see it playing (it was with a young lab puppy, about the same size, to have a playmate).
    As we were leaving that display there was a volunteer with the skeleton of a grown leopard He asked if any kids had questions. One boy asked if grown leopards would be fun to play with. This happened.

    Zoo Aide: Come here son. Do you see these claws (holds out a paw) and these teeth (holds out the skull)? If the leopard saw you coming it would jump you (lunged at boy) and rip your throat and belly open with these claws and teeth, and then start eating you before you were dead so you’d know it.

    He went on some more, but we finally managed to get the kids away from him — not before some of the boys in the group went “Cool!”, however — and we suggested to the next group’s parents “Don’t ask any questions.”

    I have a very good feeling you’d be better with the explanation than that guy was.

  3. Rich: LOL. But I’m sure they meant kilos!

    Dean: I’ve run tour groups in South and East Africa, and the number one rule: No kids below a certain size. Because you know what happens if there is a kid in a vehicle out on a game drive? Well, the leopards see that, and they jump right out of the tree, and grab the kid by the head, and drag it off screaming, then they climb up in the tree with it and start to eat the kid while the kid is still alive…. !!!

  4. 🙂

    Okay, well perhaps you wouldn’t be my first docent choice for that type of information.

    I will say that the zoo trip is one of only a few elementary school trips my son remembers favorably.

  5. Kids like gruesome.

    In my opinion, it’s a GOOD thing. You should get scared, really scared, but in a safe way, where you are a willing participant. So you learn how to deal with fear when it’s safe and you’re not in real danger, so that when you’re really in danger you aren’t dealing with the novel distraction of terror and can get on with dealing with the actual problem.

  6. One day we had a 3rd grade class visit our science building and I letting the kids touch and kind of hold a 12 foot boa. One of the boys wander up to the anatomy lab upstairs. He came running back down telling all the other 3rd graders he just touched a dead person. All of a sudden the kids were no longer interested in the snake but had run off to see and touché a dead person,

  7. Wow: can’t say I disagree completely. I was a little concerned about the zoo incident because I didn’t know all of the kids in the group, so I wasn’t sure how some might handle it. I’m also not sure whether such vivid language, immediately on meeting the kids, was the best approach. I would not have been as nervous had it been just my son and me, but nerves were heightened by having to run herd on 15 or so who weren’t mine.

    It is much funnier now than it was then.

  8. Where I live – http://castlegarsource.com/news/cougar-enters-trail-home-attacks-resident-20590#.WPqAjmnyu00

    This was 5 years ago and a little over a km from my place. Where I take my dog for walks I often see cougar tracks as well as bear.

    I used to live about 750m further up the mountain and there about 15 years ago there was a bunch of gas pipeline construction going on and as part of that there were some large aluminum storm conduits piled up in various places. There were a number of incidents right in town (Rossland) of cougars and bears having a nap in one. LOL

    Needless to say I carry a large can of bear spray with me when I go out with my dog.

  9. “Remember reading a Roald Dahl book”

    I don’t think I’ve ever read one of his books. I’m not sure why.

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