Were the Lions of Tsavo Exaggerated?

Copyright 2011 by Jackson Landers

I have been researching and writing about man-eaters a lot lately while working on a magazine article. Man-eating alligators, crocodiles, lions, leopards, etc. One always comes around to looking at the Tsavo lions when discussing this subject and I came across a very interesting article with some novel ideas about those lions in Science magazine that I missed when it originally ran in 2009.

The pair of man-eating Tsavo lions are notorious for having racked up a massive list of kills in the late 1890's while bringing work on an African railroad to a complete halt. They kept eating the workers. A decent film, 'The Ghost and the Darkness' was made about the process of hunting these lions. However, the definitive account of what happened is undoubtedly the book, 'The Man-Eaters of Tsavo,' by James Henry Patterson.

Patterson was in charge of building sixty miles of railroad, plus a bridge. His duties quickly shifted from managing a construction project to hunting the lions that were killing his staff on a nearly daily basis. He really didn't have the slightest idea as to what he was doing and in fact made a number of major mistakes which he freely owns up to in the pages of his book. This honesty on his part makes me inclined to believe his claim that the lions inflicted a confirmed body count of 135 people.

That body count was the subject of both Science's article and of a study that attempted to investigate the diets of the two Tsavo man-eaters based on isotope analysis of their hides (which are mounted and on display at the Field Museum in Chicago). The researchers concluded that the real count was actually 35.

However, it is my opinion that this the data gathered in this study does not really allow the conclusion that Patterson was incorrect or that the number of kills was exaggerated.

Isotope analysis of hair folicles, teeth and bone allowed the scientists to calculate the percentage of the lions' diet during their final months of life that consisted of human flesh. But that isn't the same thing as a kill list.

I've read Patterson's book several times and he describes various incidents in which the lions killed people but did not eat them at all (see page 49, 52, 123 of the Filiquarian Publishing edition for three separate kills of this type. There may be more that I'm forgetting).

In other incidents only a small portion of a body was eaten. These lions were often being pursued after making a kill and didn't always get to eat as much as they would have liked to. For example, on page 53 Patterson writes that the lions abandoned a carcass as he approached them with a rifle.

This study took into consideration the amount of meat typically eaten off of an animal's carcass by modern non-man-eating lions in the Tsavo region as a basis for comparison to the infamous lions. But the amount of meat that a lion eats from a dead zebra or antelope does not have a direct correlation to the amount of meat that will be eaten on average from a dead human. Herds of zebras don't come back an hour later to retrieve their dead for burial, whereas humans do. The Tsavo man-eaters would only occasionally have the opportunity to eat as much as they would prefer to from a particular dead human. More often the remains were collected and buried and then the lions needed to go kill something (or someone) else for food.

Another key point has been frequently left out of the telling of the story of the Tsavo lions. There were initially at least three lions in the group rather than the pair most often discussed. The third lion (or the first, depending on how you look at it) was also a known man-eater but is generally ignored because it was killed very soon after Patterson's arrival and didn't figure as much into his personal experience as the other lions did.

No hide or bone was saved from that third lion so there is nothing to run an isotope analysis on.

I do not question the scientific value of running an isotope analysis on a pair of known man-eaters.  Certainly this provided useful data about the overall diets of man-eaters. But it is a fact that the researchers and Science have completely ignored the presence of a third lion, ignored the confirmed deaths of victims who were not eaten at all, and ignored the fact that the lions were sometimes interrupted before they could eat their fill.

Assuming that the third lion ate an amount of human flesh equal to the average of the other two, we come up with a total figure of about 53 people's worth of meat. If they ate 53 bodies worth of meat out of a total of 135 killed, they would have retained as food about 40% of their total human kills. This sounds like a totally plausible figure to me, given the fact that humans insist on recovering our dead as soon as possible.

We still have no hard basis on which to doubt Patterson's figure of 135 total victims.