Man-eater

Tigers are recorded to have killed more people than any other big cat, and tigers have been responsible for more human deaths through direct attack than any other wild mammal.[1] About 1,000 people were reportedly killed each year in India during the early 1900s, with one individual tiger killing 430 people in India.[1] Tigers killed 129 people in the Sundarbans mangrove forest from 1969 to 1971.[1] Unlike leopards and lions, man-eating tigers rarely enter human habitations in order to acquire prey. The majority of victims are reportedly in the tiger's territory when the attack takes place.[2] Additionally, tiger attacks mostly occur during daylight hours, unlike those committed by leopards and lions.[2] The Sundarbans is home to approximately 600 royal Bengal tigers[3] who before modern times used to "regularly kill fifty or sixty people a year".[3] In 2008, a loss of habitat due to the Cyclone Sidr led to an increase in the number of attacks on humans in the Indian side of the Sunderbans, as tigers were crossing over to the Indian side from Bangladesh.[4]

A theory promoted to explain this suggests that since tigers drink fresh water, the salinity of the area waters serve as a destabilizing factor in the diet and life of tigers of Sundarbans, keeping them in constant discomfort and making them extremely aggressive. Other theories include the sharing of their habitat with human beings and the consumption of human corpses during floods.[3]

The Tsavo maneaters on display in the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago.

Man-eating lions have been recorded to actively enter human villages at night as well as during the day to acquire prey. This greater assertiveness usually makes man-eating lions easier to dispatch than tigers. Lions typically become man-eaters for the same reasons as tigers: starvation, old age and illness, though as with tigers, some man-eaters were reportedly in perfect health.[2]

The lion's proclivity for man-eating has been systematically examined. American and Tanzanian scientists report that man-eating behavior in rural areas of Tanzania increased greatly from 1990 to 2005. At least 563 villagers were attacked and many eaten over this period—a number far exceeding the more famed "Tsavo" incidents of a century earlier. The incidents occurred near Selous National Park in Rufiji District and in Lindi Province near the Mozambican border. While the expansion of villagers into bush country is one concern, the authors argue that conservation policy must mitigate the danger because, in this case, conservation contributes directly to human deaths. Cases in Lindi have been documented where lions seize humans from the centre of substantial villages. It is estimated that over 250 people are killed by lions every year.[5]

Man-eating lions studies indicate that African lions eat humans as a supplement to other food, not as a last resort.[6][7] In July 2018, a South African news website reported that three rhino poachers were mauled and eaten by lions at Sibuya Game Reserve in Eastern Cape province, South Africa.[8]

Man-eating leopards are a small percentage of all leopards, but have undeniably been a menace in some areas;[9] one leopard in India killed over 200 people.[9] Jim Corbett was noted to have stated that unlike tigers, which usually became man-eaters because of infirmity, leopards more commonly did so after scavenging on human corpses. In the area that Corbett knew well, dead people are usually cremated completely, but when there is a bad disease epidemic, the death rate outruns the supply of cremation pyre wood and people burn the body a little and throw it over the edge of the burning ghat.[10][11] In Asia, man-eating leopards usually attack at night, and have been reported to break down doors and thatched roofs in order to reach human prey. Attacks in Africa are reported less often, though there have been occasions where attacks occurred in daylight. Both Corbett and Kenneth Anderson have written that hunting the man eating panther presented more challenges than any other animal. In 2019 in India, an infant was stolen and decapitated by a leopard.[12]

Jaguar attacks on humans are rare nowadays.[13] In the past, they were more frequent, at least after the arrival of Conquistadors in the Americas. The risk to humans would increase if there were fewer capybaras, which the jaguars mainly preyed on.[14]

Due to the expanding human population, cougar ranges increasingly overlap with areas inhabited by humans. Attacks on humans are very rare, as cougar prey recognition is a learned behavior and they do not generally recognize humans as prey.[15] Attacks on people, livestock, and pets may occur when a puma habituates to humans or is in a condition of severe starvation. Attacks are most frequent during late spring and summer, when juvenile cougars leave their mothers and search for new territory. Unlike other big cat man-eaters, cougars do not kill humans as a result of old age or food preference, but in defense of their territory. Such behavior has been documented in hunts by humans, where the cougar is flushed out by dogs which it either outruns or mauls some distance away. Then, the cougar circles around and mauls the hunter in ambush attack.

Two of the Wolves of Périgord, responsible for the deaths of 18 people in February 1766, on display at the chateau of Razac in Thiviers

Contrasted to other carnivorous mammals known to attack humans for food, the frequency with which wolves have been recorded to kill people is rather low, indicating that, though potentially dangerous, wolves are among the least threatening for their size and predatory potential, except for the dog which poses lethal hazards for reasons other than predation. In the rare cases in which man-eating wolf attacks occur, the majority of victims are children.[18] Habituation is a known factor contributing to some man-eating wolf attacks which results from living close to human habitations, causing wolves to lose their fear of humans and consequently approach too closely, much like urban coyotes. Habituation can also happen when people intentionally encourage wolves to approach them, usually by offering them food, or unintentionally, when people do not sufficiently intimidate them.[18] This is corroborated by accounts demonstrating that wolves in protected areas are more likely to show boldness toward humans than ones in areas where they are actively hunted.[19]

Attacks on humans by dingoes are rare, with only two recorded fatalities in Australia. Dingoes are normally shy of humans and avoid encounters with them. The most famous record of a dingo attack was the disappearance of nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain. Her parents reported that they both saw a dingo taking Azaria out of their tent when she and her family were out on a camping trip to Uluru.[20] In 2019 in Australia, a father saved his 14-month old infant from a dingo which had dragged it away.[21]

Although dogs have many of the characteristics of bears and Big Cats known to be man-eaters, they are unlikely to act as man-eaters themselves. More often humans can be bitten to death by the packs of stray dogs, but not eaten. It is often occur in the countries of Eastern Europe, ex-USSR countries, and some South Asian coutries, like India. Predatory acts by dogs upon humans have occurred, however, and many such incidents were the result of human misconduct. During World War II, Nazi prison guards such as Irma Grese and Kurt Franz reportedly set dogs upon live prisoners in Nazi concentration camps with the dogs killing the victims and partially devouring the corpses.[22][23]

Almost all known predatory coyote attacks on humans have failed. To date, other than the Kelly Keen coyote attack and the Taylor Mitchell coyote attack, all known victims have survived by fighting, fleeing, or being rescued, and only in the latter case was the victim partially eaten, although that case occurred in Nova Scotia where the local animals are eastern coyotes (coywolves).

Although not true carnivores, pigs are competent predators and can kill and eat helpless humans unable to escape them.[31][32][33] Numerous animal trials in the Middle Ages involved pigs accused of eating children.[34] In 2019, a woman was attacked and killed by a herd of feral hogs in rural Texas. She died due to exsanguination from bite wounds.[35]

Despite small individual size, rats in large numbers can kill helpless people by eating humans alive.[36][37]

Rat torture has been documented by Amnesty International.[38]

Crocodile attacks on people are common in places where crocodiles are native. The saltwater and Nile crocodiles are responsible for more attacks and more deaths than any other wild predator that attacks humans for food. Each year, hundreds of deadly attacks are attributed to the Nile crocodile within sub-Saharan Africa. Because many relatively healthy populations of Nile crocodiles occur in East Africa, their proximity to people living in poverty and/or without infrastructure has made it likely that the Nile crocodile is responsible for more attacks on humans than all other species combined. In Australia crocodiles have also been responsible for several deaths in the tropical north of the country.[39] The Mugger crocodile is another man-eater that kills many people in Asia each year, although not to the same level as the Saltwater and Nile crocodiles. A lot of other crocodile species are also dangerous to humans, but most of the others will usually not actively try to hunt them.

Despite their manifest ability to kill prey similar to or larger than humans in size and their commonness in an area of dense human settlement (the southeastern United States, especially Florida), American alligators rarely prey upon humans. Even so, there have been several notable instances of alligators opportunistically attacking humans, especially the careless, small children, and elderly.[40] Unlike the far-more dangerous saltwater and Nile crocodiles, the majority of alligators avoid contact with humans if possible, especially if they have been hunted. Incidents have happened,[41] and they may not all have been predatory in nature.

Only very few species of snakes are physically capable of swallowing an adult human. Although quite a few claims have been made about giant snakes swallowing adult humans, only a limited number have been confirmed. In 2017 in Indonesia, an adult was discovered inside of a 7-metre-long (23 ft) python,[42] and on June 14, 2018 a 54-year-old woman named Wa Tiba was eaten by a reticulated python, which had slithered into her garden at her home.[43] Large constricting snakes will sometimes constrict and kill prey that are too large to swallow. Also, multiple cases are documented of medium-sized (3 m [9.8 ft] to 4 m [13 ft]) captive Burmese pythons constricting and killing humans, including several nonintoxicated, healthy adult men, one of whom was a "student" zookeeper.[44][45][46][47] In the zookeeper case, the python was attempting to swallow the zookeeper's head when other keepers intervened.[47] In addition, at least one Burmese python as small as 2.7 m (8.9 ft) constricted and killed an intoxicated adult man.[48]

A large constricting snake may constrict or swallow an infant or a small child, a threat that is legitimate and empirically proven. Cases of python attacks on children have been recorded for the green anaconda, the African rock python,[49] the Burmese python,[50] and possibly the Australian scrub or amethystine python.[51]

In the Philippines, more than a quarter of Aeta men (a modern forest-dwelling hunter-gatherer group) have reported surviving reticulated python predation attempts.[52] Pythons are nonvenomous, ambush predators, and both the Aeta and pythons hunt deer, wild pigs, and monkeys, making them competitors and prey.[52]

In South Africa in 2002, a 10-year-old boy was swallowed whole by a 6-metre-long (20 ft) African Rock Python, but cases like these are empirically observed and recorded, but not entirely confirmed unlike the cases mentioned above.[53]

Large Komodo dragons are the only known lizard species to occasionally attack and consume humans. Because they live on remote islands, attacks are infrequent and may go unreported. Despite their large size, attacks on people are often unsuccessful and the victims manage to escape with severe wounds.[54]

Sign warning swimmers of the danger of shark attacks

Contrary to popular belief, only a limited number of shark species are known to pose a serious threat to humans. The species that are most dangerous can be indiscriminate and will take any potential meal they happen to come across (as an oceanic whitetip might eat a person floating in the water after a shipwreck), or may bite out of curiosity or mistaken identity (as with a great white shark attacking a human on a surfboard possibly because it resembles its favoured prey, a seal).[60][61]

Of more than 568 shark species, only four have been involved in a significant number of fatal unprovoked attacks on humans: the great white shark, tiger shark, bull shark,[62] and the oceanic whitetip shark.[63] These sharks, being large, powerful predators, may sometimes attack and kill humans; it is worth noting that they have all been filmed in open water by unprotected divers.[64][65]

Attacks by piranhas resulting in deaths have occurred in the Amazon basin. In 2011, a drunk 18-year-old man was attacked and killed in Rosario del Yata, Bolivia.[66] In 2012, a five-year-old Brazilian girl was attacked and killed by a shoal of P. nattereri.[67] Some Brazilian rivers have warning signs about lethal piranhas.[68]

Reports have been made of goonch catfish eating humans in the Kali River in India.[69]

• Kali River goonch attacks