Untitled - The Field Museum

EDITOR’S LETTER
I
once owned a tiny cat (or kitten) called Nixon for a
few weeks. He was a stray and I nurtured him back to
health before giving him to a more responsible owner.
In that three weeks, Nixon (named after the power hungry
ex-US President) and I formed a bond, however brief, and
so I do understand man’s love affair with animals. Our
designer, Roui, on the other hand, once trod on a baby
pigeon, the incident traumatising him for hours afterwards.
As you can see, Open Skies HQ has vast experience of
animals, and how to care (or not) for them. So we feel
qualified to present this issue dedicated to creatures great
or small, be they furry, fast, frightening, or just plain food.
Aled Lewis taps into the spirit of this issue
with his wonderfully irreverant Toy Story
creations in our photo essay, as well as an
original work on our cover.
Elsewhere we travel to some of the world’s best zoos, each one
illustrated by the brilliant Sam Falconer. We also take a scientific
view of two of nature’s most chilling creatures: the man-eaters
of Tsavo, a pair of lions that wreaked havoc in a corner of Africa. We
speculate on the future of food, and why the earth’s growing population
could find an unlikely saviour: the insect. And we travel to Paris to
check out a most unusual store, get a bullfighter’s view of the recent ban
in Catalonia, and take a look at a remarkable commercial partnership
between man and bird in China. Enjoy the issue.
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the event of any inaccuracy please contact The Editor. Any opinion expressed
is the honest belief of the author based on all available facts. Comments and
facts should not be relied upon by the reader in taking commercial, legal,
financial or other decisions. Articles are by their nature general and specialist
advice should always be consulted before any actions are taken.
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EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Obaid Humaid Al Tayer GROUP EDITOR & MANAGING PARTNER Ian Fairservice GROUP SENIOR EDITOR
Gina Johnson • [email protected] SENIOR EDITOR Mark Evans • [email protected] EDITOR Conor Purcell •
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com. CONTRIBUTORS: HG2, Alexander Fiske-Harrison, Bruce D Patterson, Sam Falconer, Mitch Blunt, John Vidal, Brian Rea, Rachel B
Levin, Laura Hobson, Leonardo Finotti, Rebecca Lawn, Lowell Bennett, Andreas Preis, Gemma Correll, Edward McGowan, Axis Maps,
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21
CONTENTS
APRIL 2012
OUR WRITER IN LA WONDERS WHY THE CITY IS SO FASCINATED WITH
DOGS (P28)... LOCAL JAZZ STAR ELIE AFIF SHARES HIS FAVOURITE
TRACKS WITH US (P33)... WE GO SOUTH TO BUENOS AIRES AND GET
THE LOWDOWN ON THIS AMAZING CITY (P36)... AUTHOR AND
BULLFIGHTER ALEXANDER FISKE-HARRISON DEFENDS A SPORT UNDER
THREAT (P41)... WE CHECK OUT ONE OF PARIS’ MOST REMARKABLE
SHOPS (P50)... WE TRAVEL THE GLOBE AND COME BACK WITH AN
ILLUSTRATED GUIDE TO THE WORLD’S BEST ZOOS (P54)... WILL
INSECTS SAVE THE WORLD? OUR ENVIRONMENTAL EXPERT THINKS
THEY JUST MIGHT (P64)... WE TRAVEL TO CHINA AND CHRONICLE AN
AMAZING PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN MAN AND BIRD (P74)... THE MANEATING LIONS OF TSAVO WREAKED HAVOC IN KENYA MORE THAN ONE
HUNDRED YEARS AGO. WE FOLLOW THE TRAIL (P84)... ALED LEWIS
TAKES US ON A MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR OF HIS ANIMAL KINGDOM (P94)...
23
CONTRIBUTORS
ALEXANDER FISKE-HARRISON: An actor and writer, he wrote the acclaimed book on bullfighting, Into The Arena, last year. His
immersion into the world of the matador saw him compete in Spain and survive to write about the experience.
BRUCE PATTERSON: The MacAurthur Curator of Mammals at The Field Museum in Chicago, he has written a number of books
on wildlife. He is currently working on a book about bats in Kenya, investigating more than one hundred species of bats in that country.
JOHN VIDAL: The Guardian’s environment editor, he is the author of McLibel: Burger Culture on Trial and has contributed chapters to books on topics such as the Gulf War, new Europe and development.
BRIAN REA: The former art director for the Op-Ed page of the New York Times, his work has appeared in Playboy and Outside
Magazine as well as for MTV, Honda and Billabong. He currently teaches at the Art Center in Los Angeles.
ALED LEWIS: A designer, illustrator and author based in London, his Toy Stories series has been turned into greeting cards and
t-shirts, and his skill and humour has been lauded around the world.
24
ILLUSTRATION: ANDREAS PREIS
W
hat is it like to confront
a nightmare? To face a
terror that weakens your
knees, freezing you in place precisely
when you need to run? Rabbits and
antelope react to an approaching
predator with instinct and reflex, but
humans can’t avoid forecasting the
outcome of a predatory encounter.
What i s a habit ua l m a n- eater
thinking as he closes in on his next
victim? Can steely purpose and lack
of remorse be seen in his eyes? Maybe
it is impossible to see past his fingerlong fangs.
For most of a century, visitors to The
Field Museum in Chicago have done
precisely that, staring into the jaws of
the infamous ‘Man-eaters of Tsavo’,
These two lions stopped the British
colonisation of East Africa literally in
its tracks. Col. JH Patterson, the man
who shot them, eventually sold their
remains to the natural history museum where they have been exhibited
ever since.
The remarkable story of these fabled
lions has given rise to countless newspaper articles, books, documentaries,
and at least three Hollywood films.
The latest blockbuster, The Ghost and
the Darkness, carried the lions’ story
to a whole new generation. Inevitably, creative writing, artistic license,
analogy, and fuzzy science have embellished the lion’s storied history,
making it difficult to distinguish fact
from fiction. What do we really know
about the Man-eaters of Tsavo?
We know that the lions were shot in
a place called Tsavo, in what is today
southeastern Kenya, some 180 km
north west of Mombasa. Tsavo now
lies in the heart of the Greater Tsavo Ecosystem, a system of national
parks, reserves, and adjoining ranchlands that covers 40,000 sq km, the
nation’s largest wilderness. But when
86 LIONS
A lion looks inside a train
car in kenya in the 1950s
A massive
lion dragged
a worker by
the throat
from his tent,
dumping the
body nearby
the lions roamed this wilderness,
Tsavo was just a resting place for the
occasional caravan along a permanently flowing stream.
Despite its idyllic forests and cool
waters, Tsavo was yet another obstacle for the British East A frica
Company, which was responsible for
the British Empire’s holdings there.
Charged with constructing a railroad
from Mombasa to Lake Victoria, the
company faced challenges so numerous, varied, and unexpected that
the Uganda Railway was satirically
dubbed the Lunatic Express. To begin
with, few Africans wanted to help the
British build the ‘Iron Snake’, the vehicle and showcase of their political hegemony. So the British needed to bring
railway workers from its colonies in
the Indian subcontinent, chiefly via
Mumbai and Karachi.
By 1903, a total of 31,983 Asians had
been employed by the railway, many
of whom chose to remain in Kenya
after their labour contracts were fulfilled. The land they worked in was
pestilential, and the unhealthy conditions were exacerbated by unclean
water. Workers suffered from ulcers,
diarrhoea, dysenter y, scur v y, and
burrowing fleas, and their draught
animals fared worse. Veterinary statistics from 1897 and 1898 show that
all 63 camels in the Railway corrals
died, as did 128 of 350 mules, 579 of
639 bullocks, and 774 of 800 donkeys.
Impediments like these led to cost and
schedule over-runs.
Initially budgeted at $2 million in
1891, Railway construction eventually cost $8 million (in excess of $500
million in today’s terms) and took
more than a decade to complete.
But these challenges paled next to
those the railway faced in Tsavo. Sure,
it was easy enough to build a wooden
trestle across the Tsavo River, so that
the advancing railhead could creep
westward toward Lake Victoria. But it
was much more involved to build the
permanent stoneworks and embankments along the route. That charge fell
to a civil engineer, John Henry Patterson, who arrived in Mombasa from
India in March 1898.
No sooner had Patterson arrived
in Tsavo than the first workers disappeared. Their remains were later
found in the surrounding scrub, the
cause of death obliterated by scavengers but possibly a fatal dispute over
the recent payroll. However, the brutal death of Patterson’s trusted manager Ungan Singh left no doubt that
they were dealing with man-eating
lions. A tent-mate had witnessed a
massive lion stick his head in the tent’s
open door, seize Singh by the throat,
and carry him off, his heels plowing furrows in the soil. Setting out at
daybreak, Patterson found Singh’s
remains, his body largely consumed
but his head still intact, pierced by giant canines and with an expression of
horror frozen on his face.
Patterson, who was an excellent
marksman, resolved to rid the camp
of this scourge, but accomplishing
this proved more difficult than he imagined. At nightfall, as the men huddled in their tents, Patterson would
lie in wait for the lions over bait or at
the scene of the last attack. But the
screams that later pierced the air
LIONS 87
would come from
the other side of the
s prawl i n g ca mp,
to o fa r away for
him to intervene.
The lions’ cunning ability to evade
Patterson and avoid traps around
camp soon lent them supernatural
airs. When the lions roared at dusk
from the surrounding jungle, the
workers called tent-to-tent “Khabar
dar, bhaieon, shaitan ata” (Beware,
brothers, the devil is coming).
Ungan Singh was killed and eaten
in March 1898, but it was not until
December, after many other deaths,
that Patterson shot the first man-eater, “a huge brute” measuring almost 3
metres long and 1.1 metres tall. Over
the next three weeks, the man-eater’s
partner made several attacks on camp
but succeeded only in carrying off
goats and donkeys. Patterson eventually shot and killed the second maneater on 27 December, 1897, ending a
nine-month nightmare. Celebrated
by his work-crews for delivering them
from these terrors, Patterson saved
the skins and skulls of the man-eaters
as trophies.
The Railway reached Lake Victoria
three years later, in 1901. Patterson
returned to England and in 1907 published The Man-eaters of Tsavo and
other East African Adventures. There,
he claimed “[the lions] had devoured
between them no less than 28 Indian
coolies, in addition to scores of unfortunate Africans of whom no official
record was kept”. In a later account
written for The Field Museum in 1925,
he stated: “these two ferocious brutes
killed and devoured, under the most
appalling circumstances, 135 Indian
and African artisans and labourers
employed in the construction of the
Uganda Railway.” Railway records
confirm that the families of 28 men
88 LIONS
were compensated for their workrelated deaths at Tsavo, but the full
extent of the lions’ toll remained conjectural, cloaked in the mists of time.
Recently, a graduate student at
the University of California, Justin
Yeakel, conceived a novel means of
testing Patterson’s claims. Although
lion diets vary across their geographic range, lions invariably specialise
on grazing animals, especially wildebeest, zebra, and buffalo. Through
the food chain, grazers assimilate
the distinctive chemical signature of
their grasses and in turn pass this on
to the predators that eat them. So lions
the full
extent of the
lion’s toll
was initially a
mystery - some
claimed 135
people died
the jaws of a tsavo lion
normally exhibit the strong C4 signature of their usual prey, grazing animals. But because people don’t graze,
a man-eating lion should exhibit an
anomalously strong C3 signature, and
the strength of this signal should be
proportional to the number of people
he has eaten.
Testing this idea depended critically
on the availability of museum samples. We compared our man-eater
samples to modern lions from Tsavo
that eat wildlife, their prey (grazers
and browsers from Tsavo East and
Tsavo West), and even the remains
of Taita people who lived in the surrounding hills during the man-eaters’
reign. Sure enough, bone samples of
the man-eaters showed an anomalous
C3 signal, and this signal was much
stronger in the first man-eater than
the second. But bone develops slowly
and reflects the lions’ diets over the
last several years of their lives. So we
also analysed hair samples from the
man-eaters –seasonal replacement
(moulting) ensures that hair can
only reflect the diet over the last few
Colonel pat terson with the first of the two
lions he killed by the tsavaro river in kenya, 1898
90 LIONS
months. Again, we found far stronger
C3 signals in the first man-eater and
more muted signals in his companion.
Translating these signals into human
fatalities required a mathematical
model that incorporated the man-eaters’ energy requirements, the amount
of flesh they consumed per victim,
and the rate at which they assimilated what they ate into their bodies. The
model estimated that the first maneater ate the equivalent of 24 victims
and the second ate 10.5. Thus, our best
estimate (35 people) exceeds those
documented (28 Railway workers) but
falls far short of Patterson’s claim of
135 victims.
But why were the lions eating people at all? Of course, an easy answer
is because they could, but lions very
rarely turn to man-eating. In fact, a
host of reasons have been suggested
for the events in Tsavo, each with its
own adherents among commentators.
Some maintained that an epidemic
of rinderpest, a viral plague of cattle
and other hoofed stock, decimated the
lions’ natural prey, leaving them no
recourse but to hunt people.
Others observed that the Railway
had followed a caravan trail used for
centuries to bring ivory and slaves
to the coast; a steady supply of dead
and dying slaves along this trail could
have fostered man-eating traditions
in nearby predators. Naiveté among
the railway crews (for example, failing to surround their camps with
thorn stockades, as native cultures
did) might also have invited the maneating incident.
But again, the remains of the maneaters permit a scientific investigation
and suggest that none of these possibilities triggered the events in Tsavo
(although they might well have contributed to them). Instead, “infirmity”
was involved. Jim Corbett, a game
officer in colonial India, shot numerous man-eating tigers and leopards,
some of which had claimed hundreds
of victims. In virtually every case,
Corbett found that the man-eater had
become incapacitated in some manner, with broken teeth, claws, bones,
arthritis, or even porcupine quills in
the flesh. Unable to pursue their normal prey, the predators had turned to
eating people.
With this in mind, dentist Skip
Neiburger and I carefully examined
the Tsavo man-eaters, both 7-to-8year-old males in prime condition.
As is typical of adult lions, both have
a number of worn and broken teeth, a
consequence of gnawing and cracking
bones when prey is scarce. However,
the lower jaw of the first man-eater
shows only the broken stump of the
right canine, and the pulp cavity of
this tooth is fully exposed. Wear on
its margins suggests that the tooth’s
tip broke off years earlier, probably
from a desperate hoof-kick. Pulp exposures (“cavities”) in people quickly
lead to tooth decay, but this is seldom the case in cats. Nevertheless,
x-radiographs showed that this tooth
had become infected with a severe
root-tip abscess, so that any pressure
on this tooth would have caused the
lion excruciating pain. Lions use their
canine teeth to kill and hold onto large
struggling prey, and the first-maneater could no longer do this. In these
straits, he would undoubtedly have
greeted the arrival of the Railway and
3000 workers in his territory with
considerable enthusiasm.
Shortly after shooting the maneaters, Patterson discovered a small
cave or rock shelter not far from camp.
Dramatically, he wrote “I saw on the
other side a fearsome-looking cave
which seemed to run back for a considerable distance under the rocky
bank. Round the entrance and inside
the cavern I was thunderstruck to
find a number of human bones, with
here and there a copper bangle such
as the natives wear. Beyond all doubt,
the man-eaters’ den!” But this claim
seems dubious. As a rule, lions don’t
live in dens and don’t transport prey
to them – this is something that hyenas often do. In addition, the neighbouring Taita people routinely inter
the bones of their ancestors in rock
lions ate
humans
because they
were injured
and humans
made for
easier prey
shelters and consult them in times
of trouble. It seems possible that Patterson mistook an abandoned or disturbed Taita funerary niche as the
man-eaters’ den. When Samuel Andanje, Tom Gnoske, and Julian Kerbis rediscovered this shelter in 1997,
it was finally possible to reexamine
Patterson’s interpretation. Despite a
thorough excavation in 1998, archaeologist Chapurukha Kusimba failed to
recover a single human bone or artifact from either the ‘Man-eaters’ Den’
or the sand-pit in front of it.
One of the most remarkable features of the Tsavo man-eaters is their
appearance: despite being fullygrown adult males, neither has much
of a mane. In fact, the first man-eater
had only wisps of hair on his chest,
and the second was virtually maneless. The heavily maned lions that
LIONS
91
the lions have
no manes
due to their
arid location
rather than
them being a
new species
starred in The Ghost and the Darkness
hailed from the Bowmansville (Ontario) Zoo. And the man-eaters aren’t
alone. The maneless condition typifies lions in Tsavo today, particularly
those in the drier areas of Tsavo East.
What is a lion without his mane,
and how can we explain this anomaly? Lions are the only cats with manes,
and this tells us that the ancestor of
modern lions lacked a mane. This
raised the exciting possibility that
Tsavo lions might be a separate species of lion, like the maneless cave
lions of Ice Age Europe. Anticipating
this possibility, some even christened
Tsavo lions “buffalo lions” to distinguish them from normal “pride lions”.
But genetic analysis offers a convincing rebuttal to this speculation.
Gene sequences show that Tsavo
lions are typical East African lions.
Maneless lions from Tsavo East have
the same genetic makeup as maned
lions from Tsavo West and the Chyulu Hills, and identical genetic types
are found as far away as South Africa’s Kruger Park. Far from signaling
a separate species, the genetic data
suggests that manelessness may be
triggered by the environment.
92 LIONS
The two man-eating lions
at the chicago field museum
Tsavo lies near the equator, so it is war m year-rou nd.
In addition, Tsavo is dr y and the
entire region is subject to an annua l five -mont h d r oug ht . When
animals begin to overheat, the only
ways they can cool dow n involve
water (sweating or panting). This
becomes impractical where water is
in short supply.
A big flowing mane acts like a giant
blanket over the neck and shoulders.
Maned lions in hot, dry environments
need more water and, without it, they
are at a disadvantage: they can’t
travel as far or as long when they hunt
or search for mates.
So while the Tsavo lions’ lack of
manes are due to a prosaic genetic
reason, it did not stop speculation,
that they were part of a breed of
extremely ferocious lions. For those
that survived the nine-month of terror back in 1898, this reputation will
be easy to understand. For the rest of
us, a visit to The Field Museum should
be an equally compelling argument.
Bruce D. Patterson is the MacArthur Curator of Mammals at The Field Museum
in Chicago
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