Long characterized as oversized brutes with a taste for human flesh, the lions of Tsavo aren’t all they are cracked up to be, a Field Museum researcher says.
While books and movies about the notorious lions of Kenya have played up their ferociousness, Bruce Patterson’s new book takes apart some of the commonly held beliefs about the lions in “The Lions of Tsavo: Exploring the History of Africa’s Notorious Man-Eaters.”
That’s not to say the lions aren’t unique from the famous pride lions of the Serengeti. The Tsavo males, for instance, have no manes and live in a much hotter, more arid part of Africa.
“I’d like to set the record straight about what these lions are really about,” said Patterson, the MacArthur curator of mammals at the Field Museum and president of the American Society of Mammalogists.
The Field is home to the stuffed remains of two of the most famous man-eating lions in history. The two reportedly killed 135 workers building a railroad through Kenya in the late 1890s. But even the actual number they killed — like their reputation — might be wildly overstated, Patterson said, and is more likely due to environmental causes as opposed to any natural tendencies.
During the 1898 rampage, a number of factors might have led the lions to get a taste for human flesh. A plague killed much of their usual prey, and people were easy pickings, for slave traders often left slaves to die along rail routes, and local burial practices left many corpses unburied.
Plus, Patterson argues that one of the lions had a tooth problem so bad that it would have been extremely painful to kill buffalo or other prey.
The book also goes into Patterson’s current research project, an in-depth study of the lions on a ranch just outside Tsavo National Parks, the largest wildlife area in Kenya.
He and his fellow researchers have attached radio collars to four lions in order to track them, document their behavior and study their breeding practices. Hair, tissue and stool samples are taken to learn about the lions’ hormones, genes and eating habits.
Contrary to claims, the lions do not seem to be larger in size than other African lions. Data show that the lions’ body and skull size fall within a range of other lions.
“They’re not bigger,” said Patterson, disputing claims by John Patterson (no relation to Bruce), the engineer on the British railroad project who killed both lions and then toured the world telling their story.
Still, because the terrain in Tsavo is so harsh and rainfall so scarce, hunting can be more difficult and prey harder to come by. Lions still occasionally attack humans. But more frequent are lion attacks on cattle and other livestock. The conflict between man and beast, lion and livestock is mainly a matter of humans encroaching on lions’ territory — and lions running out of room to hunt.