On this episode of the world famous Sofa King Podcast, we cover the unique and horrible tale of the Tsavo Man-Eaters. They were a pair of lions who plagued the construction of a railroad in 1898 and killed perhaps as many as 135 human beings in one year. A British military man was put in charge of the railroad, and he went on an epic hunt to stop these animals from killing even more people. The lions were far more aggressive than normal, had a taste for human flesh, and were abnormally large.

In 1898, the Kenya-Uganda Railway was trying to build a bridge across the Tsavo River. The railroad officials probably should have to consulted the locals because Tsavo meant “place of slaughter” in the local dialect. (Big oopsie...) Once the camps were set up, and thousands of workers moved in to build this bridge, Lt Colonel John Henry Patterson arrived to handle the work crews. Also, within a few days of his arrival, the Lions of Tsavo started to eat people. A lot. Lions were always a threat, obviously, but it got to the point where every night, two lions would creep into the work camps and each would take a different worker.

The camps would have to listen to the screams in the darkness as the lions licked the skin off the victims and pinned them down with their claws. The next morning, parts—or none—of the dead remained. Eventually, the workers quit construction. Then, they started to mutiny. They blamed Patterson since the attacks started when he got there. The lions were evil spirits summoned by the white man, they said. So, Patterson, in part to keep his railroad masters happy, and in part to keep himself from being murdered due to bad mojo, set out to hunt the lions.

The first one went down somewhat easily, once he used similar techniques to how he had hunted tigers in India years before. But the second lion took three weeks. It never fell for the same trick twice. It outsmarted Patterson, and it was shot several times, always escaping, and always coming back. Eventually, they were both put down. They were discovered to be nine feet long (abnormally large for this type of lion in this region), and they were both—oddly—males who didn’t live within a typical lion pride structure.

So how many people did the lions actually kill? What did Patterson do with their bodies? How did that help us perhaps unravel the mystery of why these lions killed? What does modern science think? Was it a drought or a disease or a really bad tooth ache? Listen, laugh, learn.

 

 

Visit Our Sources:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/man-eaters-of-tsavo-11614317/

https://www.earthtouchnews.com/natural-world/animal-behaviour/new-evidence-in-the-long-standing-mystery-of-the-tsavo-man-eater-lions/

https://www.livescience.com/58735-man-eating-lions-analyzed.html

https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/how-many-people-did-the-man-eating-lions-of-tsavo-actually-eat

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Henry_Patterson_(author)#East_African_adventures