The Lions
of Tsavo: Exploring the Legacy of Africa's Notorious
Man-Eaters
Bruce D. Patterson. 2004. McGraw-Hill, New
York. 231 pp., hardbound. $24.95.
Chicago's Field Museum is home to the worn skins of two of the world's most infamous lions: the man-eaters of Tsavo. In a nine-month rampage, these lions killed 135 workers building a railway from Kenya to Uganda that has been dubbed the "lunatic express." The familiar story has been told many times since 1898. It inspired the film "The Ghost and the Darkness," starring Michael Douglas as an American hunter who finally shot the marauding lions, ending their "reign of terror." (In fact, the hero was a British civil engineer.)
In The Lions of Tsavo, Field Museum curator Bruce D. Patterson retells this story but in his attempt to "make museum specimens talk," he uses the fabled twosome to explore a wide range of issues, from why big cats become man-eaters to how to conserve these magnificent, and sometimes dangerous, beasts in our increasingly crowded world. He also describes his recent research on the lions of Tsavo, which, unlike their Serengeti cousins, are little known scientifically. Among other differences between the two populations, males in Tsavo lack manes. The Tsavo man-eaters on display at the Field Museum—both un-maned males—bear little resemblance to the long-haired males familiar to zoo visitors.
The phenomenon of a lion hunting people as its primary prey begs for an explanation, but many isolated cases of man-eating may be simply the result of opportunity—when lions and people meet, people may become prey. As Patterson says, "We tend to overlook this obvious fact because opportunity is so easily overshadowed by capability." (Given their capability, it is curious that lions don't kill people more often than they do.)
In other cases, people are killed when they try to steal a carcass that lions are feeding on. It's surprising but true that people throw rocks or shoot arrows at lions to drive them away from a kill, then take the meat for themselves. Many other ideas are cited for lions becoming confirmed man-eaters, and Patterson tests each of them against what is know about the Tsavo duo. Most often blamed are age and infirmity—old or injured lions can't kill their usual large prey, such as buffalos and zebras, so they turn to softer targets: people and their livestock. The Tsavo males were in prime condition, but Patterson and his colleagues, including a forensic dentist, examined their teeth and found one had suffered from a broken, abscessed canine. This would have made it impossible for him to deliver a killing bite to large prey, and may have forced him to turn to people. The second lion may simply have been "guilty by association"; there is some evidence he never himself killed any railway workers.
On the other hand, Patterson compared the teeth of a large sample of "problem lions" shot outside Tsavo parks when they attacked people or livestock with those of lions in museums, most of which had been killed by sport hunters. It turns out that the problem lions had better teeth than the museum sample, meaning that some other factors turned these lions into man-eaters.
Depletion of non-human prey may also compel a hungry lion to eat people. In the case of the Tsavo lions, a contemporaneous rinderpest epidemic had killed most of their natural prey. At the same time, a drought caused crops to fail and many people to starve and die—and become food for scavenging lions. Similarly, slave caravans passing through Tsavo left their dead where they fell, while in the past the Masai buried only great chiefs, leaving the bodies of other dead people in the bushes to be eaten by scavengers. With other prey gone, and people already a familiar food item, it was an easy step to the lions' specializing on people. Most likely, several of these agents came into play in Tsavo, and some continue to create man-eaters today.
Patterson is very interested in the absence of manes in male Tsavo lions. Many functions have been attributed to the lion's mane, with the best evidence suggesting that it is a visual signal of a male's quality as a potential mate or competitor. But the mane seems to be a newly evolved feature: None of the 73 depictions of lions found in France's Chauvet caves, which date to the Pleistocene of 32,000 years ago, includes manes even though other details of their appearance and behavior are astonishingly realistic. This led some to speculate that Tsavo's lions were a distinct subspecies descended from or closely related to Pleistocene lions. Morphological and DNA analyses by Patterson and his colleagues refute this notion, however, leading Patterson to ask what is unique about Tsavo and its lions to account for this condition. His work is still underway, but one promising hypothesis relates to Tsavo's climate. Tsavo is both very hot and very dry, with a dry season that lasts from four to eight months. A heavy mane, which makes it harder for a male to stay cool while also conserving water, would be a decided disadvantage there.
Patterson has done a great job making his museum lions talk; only a bit of their conversation with us is mentioned here. Read the book to hear all of the stories they helped Patterson tell.
—Susan Lumpkin
ZooGoer
33(3) 2004. Copyright 2004 Friends of the National Zoo.
All rights reserved.
