Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! When wandering around Britain, we rarely give a thought to the creatures we could encounter en route. We might shield our chips from seagulls at the beach or avoid walking through fields with grazing livestock, but protecting ourselves from becoming another animal’s lunch is seldom on our list of considerations.
Early humans were especially vulnerable to predators. For a start, we were much smaller than today, weighing just 60-90lbs. We had flat nails rather than claws, and our option for escape from predators was likely to have been tree-climbing rather than running.
Not only were we physically disadvantaged, there were also considerably more predators in existence, including saber-toothed cats, conical-toothed cats and even hyenids. In prehistoric times, these were quite different beasts from the hyenas with which we are familiar today, particularly in terms of size. “They were larger than lions, preying on archaic humans and Homo neanderthalis,” says anthropologist Dr Donna Hart.
Some question whether these hyenas actually preyed upon humans, but fossil evidence found in caves in Morocco shows that they certainly ate them, whether or not they hunted them down first.
How identifying a man-eating lioness suggested a more nuanced response than pure revenge.
Humans as cat food is not just a thing of the past. Dr Amy Dickman is a conservation biologist who set up the Ruaha Carnivore Project in Tanzania. “Southern Tanzania seems to be a bit of a hotspot for man-eating lions,” she explains. “These attacks tap into the most primal part of ourselves, this fear of being snatched suddenly by a large carnivore, and unfortunately it does still happen out in the bush.”
Estimates suggest that some 50 people are killed by lions a year in Tanzania, though in a high year this could be as many as 140. Amy initially thought that the attacks she investigated would be biased towards vulnerable, elderly or very young victims, yet in fact the majority were young men. They were often preyed upon while stumbling home after a few too many drinks.
The threat of these predators can cause a very visceral sense of fear in people. Communities can sometimes end up acting in a retaliatory manner when they feel threatened, resulting in numerous innocent animals being killed. In other instances, empathy prevails instead. Amy explains that she worked with a community in which a grandmother was killed by a lioness which was found to be heavily pregnant. When the community discovered this, they decided to spare the lion. “The community wanted her to be given a chance, to see whether it would happen again. Amazingly it didn’t and they were very tolerant of that. It was a real lesson to see how people are able to coexist with these animals.”
Mathen “Rajeev” Mathew, a wildlife consultant, has been keeping a record of wildlife attacks in India. He has noticed that leopard attacks have in fact overtaken tiger attacks on humans recently. As well as attacks by elephants, wild boars, and even monkeys, Rajeev has identified 67 fatal attacks by leopards and tigers this year alone.
For young tigers, he explains, the killings are indiscriminate. After leaving their parents they spend time on the move being pursued by other dominant tigers while they try to establish their own territory, so they kill whatever they can find – including people. Sometimes, tigers can kill humans without any intention of eating them. Rajeev says that this is evident because “when it has no intentions of eating the person, they are left with their clothes on. As soon as it starts to feel it can eat that prey, the first thing it does is disrobe the person.”
While these large young cats may eat whatever they can get their claws on, both tigers and leopards can be surprisingly calculating in the way in which they hunt humans. Rajeev recounts how one particularly cunning leopard would show itself in a patch of long grass by a village. The villagers noticed and would come to chase it away, and on doing so the leopard would sneak around into the village and capture its preferred prey: children and babies.
There are human-eating predators closer to home than you might think: wolves. The wolf population in Europe is increasing, and some are keen for these fine hunters to be reintroduced to the UK. Historically, wolves have received a bad rap for preying on farmers’ livestock, but records suggest that, like the Big, Bad one encountered by Little Red Riding Hood, they also preyed upon people.
Troy Bennett, a wolf tracker in France, explains that when wolves went beyond killing sheep and farm animals to people, communities would go out and eradicate local wolf populations systematically. Troy says that this treatment has led to wolves’ timid dispositions: “they know humans are trouble.”
However, in countries where wolves have an opportunity to acclimatise to human presence, their behaviour becomes bolder. In France, Troy witnessed a huge loss of livestock, leading to locals killing large numbers of wolves in response. Troy is confident that wolves’ predatory instincts will become more apparent when they spend more time with humans: “Once wolves start living with people around them again, they’ll start to become human habituated and we’ll start to see problems… They’ll start targeting people again, and that is inevitable. They’re a predator.”
Many people have a penchant for porcine produce, but our curly-tailed farmyard friends have also been known to eat us too. Unlike the other animals listed here though, pigs don’t intentionally hunt us down. In a tragic incident just this year, some bones were the only remains discovered of a Polish pig farmer who was almost entirely consumed by his livestock. In Wales, a farmer was hospitalised after being repeatedly bitten on his arms and legs by one of his pigs which pinned him against a tractor. The pig only stopped its attack when the farmer’s wife turned a hosepipe on it.
Pigs are omnivorous, like us, and they’re certainly not known to be fearsome predators of humans, so it is unlikely that they are staging Orwellian uprisings on farms. However, there have been a number of reports of farmers falling or collapsing from a medical emergency in a pig sty, then being eaten by their undiscerning livestock. Yikes!
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On the menu
Biologist Adam Hart explores our relationship with some of the animal kingdoms deadliest predators, and speaks to experts in human-wildlife conflict dedicated to reducing attacks on both humans and predators in Africa and India. On the menu
Herbivores, Carnivores, and Omnivores for Kids | Learn which animals eat plants, meat, or both
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