How Has Our Relationship With Wild Animals Changed Since The Time Of Colonel Patterson
/https://tf-cmsv2-smithsonianmag-media.s3.amazonaws.com/filer/Colonel-Patterson-first-Tsavo-Lion-631.jpg)
They are maybe the world'south virtually notorious wild lions. Their ancestors were vilified more than 100 years agone as the human-eaters of Tsavo, a vast swath of Kenya savanna around the Tsavo River.
Bruce Patterson has spent the past decade studying lions in the Tsavo region, and for several nights I went into the bush with him and a team of volunteers, hoping to glimpse one of the beasts.
Nosotros headed out in a truck along narrow ruddy dirt trails through thick scrub. A spotlight threw a slender axle through the darkness. Kudus, huge antelopes with curved horns, skittered away. A herd of elephants passed, their massive bodies silhouetted in the dark.
One evening just after midnight, we came upon three lions resting by a water hole. Patterson identified them equally a 4-year-old male he has named Dickens and ii unnamed females. The three lions rose and Dickens led the 2 females into the scrub.
On such forays Patterson has come to meliorate understand the Tsavo lions. Their prides, with up to 10 females and simply i male, are smaller than Serengeti lion prides, which take up to xx females and two or more males. In Tsavo, male lions do not share power with other males.
Tsavo males look different likewise. The most vigorous Serengeti males sport large dark manes, while in Tsavo they have brusque, thin manes or none at all. "Information technology's all about water," Patterson says. Tsavo is hotter and drier than the Serengeti, and a male with a heavy mane "would squander his daily water assart simply panting under a bush-league, with none to spare for patrolling his territory, hunting or finding mates."
But it'south the lions' reputation for preying on people that attracts attention. "For centuries Arab slave caravans passed through Tsavo on the way to Mombasa," said Samuel Kasiki, deputy director of Biodiversity Research and Monitoring with the Kenya Wildlife Service. "The expiry rate was high; it was a bad area for sleeping sickness from the tsetse fly; and the bodies of slaves who died or were dying were left where they dropped. So the lions may take gotten their taste for human flesh past eating the corpses."
In 1898, 2 lions terrorized crews constructing a railroad bridge over the Tsavo River, killing—according to some estimates—135 people. "Hundreds of men barbarous victims to these savage creatures, whose very jaws were steeped in claret," wrote a worker on the railway, a project of the British colonial authorities. "Basic, flesh, peel and blood, they devoured all, and left not a trace behind them."
Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson shot the lions (a 1996 picture, The Ghost and the Darkness, dramatized the story) and sold their bodies for $5,000 to the Field Museum in Chicago, where, stuffed, they greet visitors to this 24-hour interval.
Bruce Patterson (no relation to John), a zoologist with the museum, continues to written report those animals. Chemical tests of pilus samples recently confirmed that the lions had eaten man mankind in the months before they were killed. Patterson and his colleagues estimate that one lion ate 10 people, and the other about 24—far fewer than the legendary 135 victims, but still horrifying.
When I arrived in Nairobi, word reached the capital letter that a lion had just killed a adult female at Tsavo. A cattle herder had been devoured weeks earlier. "That's non unusual at Tsavo," Kasiki said.
Still, today'south Tsavo lions are not innately more bloodthirsty than other lions, Patterson says; they attack people for the same reason their forebears did a century ago: "our inroad into what was once the territory of lions." Injured lions are especially unsafe. One of the original man-eaters had severe dental disease that would have made him a poor hunter, Patterson constitute. Such lions may acquire to set on people rather than game, he says, "because we are slower, weaker and more defenseless."
Paul Raffaele's volume Among the Smashing Apes volition be published in February.
Source: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/man-eaters-of-tsavo-11614317/
Posted by: holderbray1962.blogspot.com
0 Response to "How Has Our Relationship With Wild Animals Changed Since The Time Of Colonel Patterson"
Post a Comment