In an ever-crowded world, conserving predators means valuing the people that live – and can die – alongside them says Adam Hart
In a recent study ranking animals in terms of perceived ‘charisma’, the top two spots went to the tiger and lion. Six of the top ten were predators.
Whether you’ve grown up with Simba, Shere Khan or Yogi Bear, and whether you are driving a Jaguar or cheering on the British Lions rugby team, predators are deeply entrenched in our heritage and culture.
Despite this, and despite the essential role they play in properly functioning ecosystems, many large predators are facing serious challenges. Their ranges and populations are diminishing as we take their land for agriculture, mines, roads and developments, and remove their prey by hunting species such as antelope and deer. What habitat we don’t take, we degrade and fragment, making life especially difficult for species that need large amounts of space.
Added to those pressures is our long history of persecution – our killing of predators out of fear for our families and livestock. Together, all these factors have conspired to push many predators to the edge.
The charisma of predators, combined with the risks of extinction, has bought them to the forefront of many conservation initiatives, supported by media attention and public concern. Indeed, in the UK, we often seem more concerned with safeguarding exotic predators than the creatures in our own back gardens.
But while calls and actions to ‘Save the Tiger’ are important and necessary, living alongside dangerous animals is much harder than simply making donations. In some parts of the world, the species we invest great effort into protecting can cause immense hardship, taking human lives and devastating livelihoods.
If conservation is to be truly successful, then we must understand the price paid by those people that make their homes in areas that we, safely living thousands of miles away, refer to as ‘habitat’.
While animals are often faster, stronger and equipped with sharper senses than us, we humans are no weaklings, and our intelligence often compensates for our shortcomings. As nature’s supreme tool-users, we can build shelters and make weapons. But we still can’t outrun a lion or outfight a tiger, and numerous large predators, including big cats, crocodiles, spotted hyenas and some bears, regard us as potential prey. And I am not referring to defensive attacks, rather predators hunting humans in ways that are no different to hunting antelope.
Two species that stand out as predators of people are those charisma-league champions, lions and tigers. Historical reports of ‘man-eating’ big cats are well known. The famous lions of Tsavo that terrorised the Kenya-Uganda railway construction in the late 1800s likely killed at least 135 people in events dramatised in several films, such as The Ghost and The Darkness (1996). In India, British hunter and naturalist Jim Corbett documented the activities of some notorious tigers and leopards, including the Champawat tigress responsible for killing at least 436 people at the turn of the 20th century, and the so-called man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag, which took at least 125 from 1918 to 1926.
Reading these accounts, written at a time when predators were much more abundant, it is easy to think of such events as unfortunate parts of history. But the reality is that both lions and tigers continue to kill and eat people, with tiger attacks in particular becoming more common.
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In 2020 I made a documentary for BBC Radio 4 called On the Menu, which explores our complex relationships with large predators. One contributor, Rajeev Mathew, records tiger and leopard attacks in India. No central database exists, so he collates information from various sources, including local papers. I remember well the first photograph he sent me of a victim, a man who had been killed and partially eaten while collecting firewood. A small cloth opened up to reveal a head, part of a hand and part of a femur, some flesh still attached. I receive similar images all too regularly now. It is not so much the gore I find upsetting, but the knowledge that the victims’ families have to face such an awful reality.
Mathew estimates that tigers may kill at least 500 people in India per year, with leopards probably matching this number. Conservation efforts focussed on tigers have led to major gains, with India and Nepal both doubling their tiger populations in the past decade. But tigers have large home ranges, and as their numbers increase, young males tend to get pushed out of prime habitat towards areas where more people live, with grimly predictable results. The Sundarbans, an extensive, wildlife-rich area of mangrove straddling the India-Bangladesh border, has become particularly notorious for tiger attacks, with consequences more far-reaching than the tragedy of a loss of life (see box on p84).
In Africa, lions can be just as challenging. Though numbers of these cats are greatly depleted, with perhaps just 24,000 remaining, and though their range has hugely contracted, there are nevertheless some regions where reasonable populations still exist. Tanzania in particular has more wild lions than any other nation, and they are a major draw for international tourists. But they can also be a major problem for people who live where lions hunt.
Attacks have been relatively well-studied in Tanzania. Between 1990 and 2009, at least 1,000 people were reported attacked, more than two-thirds of whom were killed and eaten (many more incidents will almost certainly have gone unrecorded). Lion attacks in Tanzania continue to the present day. One particularly horrific incident occurred in the Ngorongoro Crater in August 2021, in which three children were killed and another injured while searching for missing cattle.
The event in Ngorongoro was widely covered in the media, largely because it took place in a well-known location. In general, unless a tourist is involved, it is rare for predator attacks to gain much attention in the press and rarer still for victims to be named. In fact, attacks may not even get a mention in local papers if they occur in areas where such events are not deemed unusual. Mathew is starting to see a growing phenomenon of ‘news fatigue’ in India as tiger and leopard attacks become increasingly common.
So numerous are lion attacks in certain areas of Tanzania that it is now possible to analyse the factors that might make particular people vulnerable. And there is one that is key: poverty. This is apparent not only in Tanzania, but also in India, and indeed more or less anywhere that humans are killed by predators.
The rural poor tend to have lifestyles that are intimately associated with their environment, putting them at greater risk of crossing paths with large and dangerous animals. Indian villagers venture into remote forests for firewood and other materials, for instance, while Tanzanian villagers sleep in their fields to guard their crops against raiding bush pigs, which in turn attract lions. The rural poor generally live in flimsy dwellings, and there are many reports of lions and spotted hyenas attacking people as they sleep. Poor people also travel on foot and defecate outside, and very often have to bathe, wash their clothes and collect drinking water by directly accessing rivers and lakes.
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It’s activity near or in water that makes humans vulnerable to another group of predators: the crocodilians. Of all the crocodilians known to prey on people, it is Africa’s Nile crocodile that takes the most, and probably accounts for more deaths than any other predator in Africa. Reaching up to 5.5m in length, this freshwater giant is quite capable of subduing large prey such as Cape buffalo – a human hunched over their washing falls well within its prey spectrum.
Nile crocodiles kill far more people than the saltwater crocodile of Australasia, which has been firmly typecast as an aggressive predator thanks to films such as Crocodile Dundee. One individual, known as Gustave, who lived on the northern shore of Burundi’s Lake Tanganyika, is rumoured to have killed more than 300 people in his lifetime. But again, I bet if you search for news stories on crocodile attacks, the bulk of the western media will carry reports of surfers and swimmers targeted in Australia. In reality, as with the big cats, it is the rural poor of Africa and Indonesia (where saltwater crocodiles also live) that pay the price of co-existing with crocs. And, significantly, these people are not using the water for recreation, but to fulfil basic human needs.
To protect predators from people, we must protect people from predators. Many villagers have endured the horrors of losing loved ones, with each terrible and tragic incident rippling out through communities and often inciting the desire to eliminate the threat using means such as poison or snares. But this sort of human-wildlife conflict could be greatly reduced through educational outreach work, such as informing villagers in Africa when and where crocodiles are most likely to attack; and development projects, such as building lion-proof bomas for cattle or installing pumps and wells that reduce human presence on waterways. Indeed, this is the less glamorous, less photogenic side of wildlife conservation.
When attacks do happen, it is a natural human desire to seek revenge. Experiences around the world teach us that sometimes, removing an animal that has taken the lives of people can save countless others from an ensuing wave of fear-induced killings. Take the 4m false gharial that took a man in Pangkut, Borneo, in January 2009. It was hunted down and killed, but no further individuals were targeted. Yet another croc attack in nearby Sarawak triggered the widespread and indiscriminate killing of all crocodilians, leading to serious conservation concern. Effective conservation can sometimes mean taking counter-intuitive approaches and making difficult decisions.
What predators teach us more than any other type of animal is that successful conservation must include communities. Local people should be involved in, not excluded from, conservation, and prosper from it. Tigers are a conservation success story in Nepal thanks largely to the community forestry programme that began in the 1970s, which placed local people in charge of their resources.
Community-based approaches are often far from easy, and rarely helped by the ‘white saviour complex’ that can be a feature of conservation, nor by celebrity-driven narratives, often fronted by well-intentioned actors with little sense of the bigger picture or real understanding of what life is really like for those living just off-camera. Animals are nearly always front and centre, with people, if depicted at all, often cast as villains. “We shouldn’t be there; it is the animal’s home,” is a common refrain. But that’s easy to say when your home was built on habitat cleared long ago.
If we want to live in a world where dangerous predators roam free, we need to balance this desire with human lives. We need to develop empathy for those people who pay the ultimate price of conservation success, and we need to remember that conservation isn’t ‘done to’, it is ‘done with’. And above all, we need to realise that without community-focussed approaches that strike the right balance, we will fail to protect the species we value the most.
Main image © Getty Images