by Brian Griffith.
Our modern awareness of disease makes us extremely averse to scavenging dead meat. We usually assume that hunters eat only fresh-killed beasts. But African lions and Bushpeople never had such a rule, and it seems they shared each others’ kills. Concerning the big cats’ food, in 1969, George Schaller and Gordon Lowther followed a male lion around the Serengeti plain of Tanzania for three weeks. They watched what the lion ate, and found that in the whole three weeks this lion “killed nothing but ate seven times, either by scavenging or by joining other lions on their killˮ (Vaillant, 2010, 111–112). The great herds of wildebeest or zebra served as a vast moving banquet, with scraps of food constantly falling off the table. Many animals simply got sick, fell by the wayside, and the lions cleaned them up. The big cats ate their fill, and wandered off to let other scavengers finish the job. Schaller and Lowther tried measuring the edible animal parts they found lying around in the course of a 20-hour walk, and found over 1,000 pounds of “food.ˮ They felt that groups of early humans could easily find enough to eat by following the herds and eating lion leftovers. And strangely enough, we have a Sufi story from tenth-century Iraq that presumes to tell the lions’ side of the story:
Before you humans were created, we carnivores didn’t … hunt, because there was easily enough to sustain ourselves just from eating the corpses of the dead. Our ancestors didn’t need to endanger themselves by hunting and killing. The lions, tigers, bears and their ilk found what they needed and were satisfied. But when you, the children of Adam and Eve came and conquered the flocks and herds of the cloven-hoofed ones, locked them behind fences and doors, and prevented them from returning to the wilderness, then we carnivores lacked their corpses and were forced to hunt among the living. (Laytner and Bridge, 2005, 65)
Elizabeth Marshall Thomas looked for clues concerning the lives of early hunters by traveling around Namibia’s Kalahari desert with groups of ¡Kung Bushmen in the 1960s. She found they thought nothing of nudging lions aside to take killed meat. The hunting party Thomas traveled with met seven groups of lions, who moved away once the people approached. When the ¡Kung chased an antelope, it would run to the point of exhaustion, and then a lion would often grab it. The ¡Kung commonly found a lion eating their animal. They would calmly approach the big cat, explaining that this meat belonged to them. The lion would depart and the ¡Kung got their food.
Before the ¡Kung were pushed onto reservations, they had a certain understanding with the Kalahari lions. One hunter told Elizabeth Thomas, “The lions around here don’t harm people. Where lions arn’t hunted, they arn’t dangerousˮ (Vaillant, 2010, 116). Probably the ¡Kung had proven long ago that they could defend themselves with spears, etc., and the lions had learned to take people off their list of obtainable foods. Of course at night, when most lions do their serious hunting, the ¡Kung didn’t dare leave their campfires.
It seems that the understandings between fellow predators were subject to certain conditions. As the just-mentioned ¡Kung elder said, “Where lions arn’t hunted, they arn’t dangerous.ˮ And in most of Africa they definitely were hunted. Also, the big predators had to have enough land and wild prey to live on. Across most of the world, people have violated both those conditions. Even in the Kalahari, where native rock paintings show a world of animals and hunters stretching back over 10,000 years, the paintings made during the past 200 years portray men on horseback with guns. And many older African cultures also targeted lions. In East Africa’s Rift Valley, the Masai herdspeople treated lions the way Europeans treated wolves. The Masai were ready to challenge or kill any lion approaching their cows, and real manhood required killing a lion. Like cowboys in range wars, the Masai drove off animals or people who obstructed their herds’ free passage. In general, all wild animals learned to fear the Masai. Conservationist Cynthia Moss noticed that the “elephants, along with buffaloes, zebras, wildebeests, waterbucks … were concentrated in a small area where the Masai did not bring their livestock.ˮ Also, “having spent thousands of hours with the Amboseli elephants, I know that what they fear most is the Masaiˮ (Preece, 1999, 178).
The decline of lion-human relations is visible in the Gir Protected Area of Gujarat, India. When zoologist Ravi Chellam hired a local boy to show him around, Chellam was at first alarmed when the lions walked right by them. The boy just leaned on his stick and watched them like it was routine. Soon, Chellam was taking close up photos of the lions. “I did all my work on foot,ˮ he said. But then, “when I was in Africa last year, they refused to believe it. They’re not used to people on footˮ (Quammen, 2003, 83–84). African animals, Chellam was informed, will just charge and kill you.
In the past, lion-human relations in Gujarat’s Gir region were probably fairly good. But as Chellam spoke, they were getting worse. The Gir lions were a growing hazard in the villages that encroached around an already too-small island of forest. There was a disturbing rise of lion attacks on farm animals and villagers. As in the Sufi story, the possibility of co-existence between people and carnivores was growing doubtful.
In Siberia, the terms of understanding with tigers have been roughly similar. Eastern Siberian Natives like the Nanai or Udege people have avoided initiating hostilities with tigers. A Nanai elder named Vasily Dunkai said, “there are two hunters in the taiga: a man and a tiger. As professional hunters, we respect each other: he chooses his path and I choose mine. Sometimes our paths intersect, but we do not intrude upon each other in any way. The taiga is his home; he is the master. I am also a master in my own home, but he lives in the taiga all the time; I don’t” (Vaillant, 2010, 150, 110).
On meeting a tiger in the forest, the Siberians used to beg the tiger’s forgiveness for trespassing. They tried to propitiate tigers by leaving some meat from their kills for the forest’s lords, and some hunters claimed that the tigers returned the favor. Ivan Dunkai explained, “the tiger will help me, because I’ve asked himˮ (Vaillant, 2010, 150, 110). If tigers ate someone, the Natives reasoned that the victim must have done something to deserve it.
Perhaps because Joseph Stalin could identify with kings of the forest, he forbade all tiger hunting in the early 1930s. After trapping in the taiga since 1934, a Siberian hunter reported, “I saw them. But I never shot them. It was not permitted to us to shoot tigers.ˮ Besides, according to the Udege people’s beliefs, “If you shoot a tiger, then fate will come back to do something to youˮ (Quammen, 2003, 349–350). And this belief seems to be literally true. In his riveting book The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, John Vaillant recounts a 1997 case where a man who tried to shoot tigers for the Chinese market was hunted down and ripped apart. This hunter, who was an ethnic Russian, set a trip-wire gun trap, and the tiger dodged the bullet. Then, likely by the smell on the rifle, the tiger identified and went for the gun’s owner, heading straight cross-country for the cabin where that hunter lived. Concerning the record of such cases, Vladimir Schetinin (a former head of eastern Siberia’s “Inspection Tiger” police unit) said that over the previous 30 years, “there are at least eight cases that my teams and I investigated, and we all arrived at the same conclusion: if a hunter fired a shot at a tiger, that tiger would track him down, even if it took him two or three months. It is obvious that tigers will sit and wait specifically for the hunter who has fired shots at himˮ (Vaillant, 2010, 158).
Of course the state of relations between Siberians and tigers is a product of local history. The probable reason that Siberian tigers generally leave the local Natives alone is because they learned long ago that local hunters could defend themselves very well. This is clear because south of the Russian border, in Korea, China, or India, tigers commonly took an appalling toll on village people in past centuries. For example, in 1902 the government of India recorded 1,046 human deaths from tiger attacks. In these lands, local villagers were banned from bearing deadly weapons, while the ruling classes hunted tigers for sport. The villagers had little effective defense against tiger attacks, and the tigers commonly took people as fair game. But in Siberia, people were quite well armed. It seems that a general truce emerged—unless the peace was broken by Russian settlers bearing their supremist assumptions, such as Ivan Gambovich Kulindziga, who asked “What does the tiger give us? … You can’t eat ’em. They don’t produce anything. They steal our gameˮ (Quammen, 2003, 351). Which is a lot to say for the ecosystem’s top predator. As the Udege tribe shaman Vasily Dunkai explained after the 1997 tiger attack, “This tiger knew who injured him. The tiger is a very clever predator with a very big brain; he can tell apart who is darker and who is lighter, plus every man has his own distinct smell. That’s why he didn’t eat my dad [Ivan Dunkai] or my brother [Mikhail]. He ate the people who harmed him: he ate Russiansˮ (Vaillant, 2010, 250).
Sources:
Laytner, Rabbi Annson, and Bridge, Rabbi Dan, translators. (2005) The Animals’ Lawsuit Against Humanity: A Modern Adaption of an Ancient Animal Rights Tale. Fons Vitae, Louisville, KY.
Preece, Rod (1999) Animals and Nature: Cultural Myths, Cultural Realities. UBCPress, Vancouver.
Quammen, David (2003) Monster of God: The Man-Eating Predator in the Jungles of History and the Mind. W.W. Norton & Co., New York.
Vaillant, John (2010) The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival. Alfred A. Knopf, New York.
[excerpted from the upcoming book, Animal Wars, by Brian Griffith]