Man eater (animal)

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Preparations from Tsavo's ogre in the Field Museum of Natural History , Chicago . Sold to the museum in 1924 for $ 5,000 by its conqueror, John Henry Patterson.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reports the capture of a man-eating shark on the New Jersey coast

As ogre individual animals that have specialized in killing and eating of people are commonly known. This behavior is rare because it assumes that wild animals or humans have penetrated into the other habitat. In big cats , it deviates from the usual eating habits. Some predators went down in history as cannibals because of large numbers of human victims. The tigress of Champawat in northern India holds the well-known record with 436 registered deaths until she was shot by Jim Corbett in 1907 .

The fear of ogre-eaters - especially of tigers - and mythological ideas have found their expression in folk tales in the affected areas. The phenomenon is also a topic of popular literature.

Social behavior

Wild animals that kill and eat humans come from only a few animal groups:

Sharks : great white shark , bull shark , tiger shark
Reptiles : Komodo dragon , various crocodiles , various giant snakes
Big cats : tiger , lion , leopard
Bears : brown bear , polar bear

Since predators rarely occur in habitats shaped by human civilization, incidents usually occur in remote and natural areas. Most of the documented reports of cannibals were made by the colonial administrations in Asia and Africa in the 19th and early 20th centuries. According to this, around 1200 people in British India were killed mainly by tigers and, in a smaller number of cases, by leopards. In 1946, 64 people died from tiger attacks in an area on Java . Due to the significantly higher population of tigers in earlier times, high numbers of victims were recorded mainly before the 20th century.

Among the snakes, anacondas and reticulated pythons , which can be six meters long and eat wild boars and monkeys, are principally able to devour humans. A man devoured by a python in Indonesia was reported in 2017.

Individual cases

Fictional cannibals

Like the dog ( Kerberos in Greek mythology ), the wolf is an animal of the realm of the dead. In the illustrated manuscripts for the Schembartlauf of the 15th century, a picture shows a wolf figure who is carrying a human being and is thus characterized as an ogre.

The short story The Man-Eater by William Knighton (1834-1900) is about a horse characterized as an ogre who emerges victorious from a fight against a tiger. The question of to what extent horses eat meat has been investigated since then.

In the story of Sinbad the Seafarer , part of the fairy tales from the Arabian Nights , the hero is attacked by a snake and his two companions are eaten by it.

The Morlocks in HG Wells Time Machine are also cannibals .

literature

General:

  • Alex McCormick: The Mammoth Book of Man-Eaters: Over 100 Terrifying Stories of Creatures Who Prey on Human Flesh , Carroll & Graf, July 2003, ISBN 0-7867-1170-1 . (also treats other dangerous animals)
  • Mario Ludwig: Fascination with cannibals. Amazing stories about the most dangerous animals in the world. Heyne, Munich 2012.
  • John Seidensticker , Susan Lumpkin: Big Cats. Jahr, Hamburg, ISBN 0-86438-233-2 , pp. 204-209.
  • Lamar Underwood: Man Eaters: True Tales of Animals Stalking, Mauling, Killing, and Eating Human Prey . The Lyons Press, Guilford (CT) 2000, ISBN 1-58574-197-3 .

Bears:

  • Stephen Herrero: Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance . The Lyons Press, Guilford (CT) 2002, ISBN 1-58574-557-X .
  • Scott McMillion: Mark of the Grizzly: True Stories of Recent Bear Attacks and the Hard Lessons Learned . Falcon, 1998, ISBN 1-56044-636-6 .
  • Larry Mueller, Marguerite Reiss: Bear Attacks of the Century: True Stories of Courage and Survival , 2005, ISBN 1-59228-270-9 .

Tiger:

Lions:

Leopards:

  • Jim Corbett (Author), Raymond Sheppard (Illustrator): The Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag. 1947. New edition: (Oxford India Paperbacks) Oxford University Press, London / New York 1989, ISBN 0-19-562256-1 ( online at Internet Archive )

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Top 10 Worst Man Eaters In History. listverse.com, October 10, 2010
  2. ^ Neale Bates: Tracking Man-Eaters: The Jim Corbett story. ECS Nepal, July 12, 2010
  3. ^ Panchanan Mohanty: The Other Maternal Uncles in Indian Languages. In: Panchanan Mohanty, Ramesh C. Malik, Eswarappa Kasi (eds.): Ethnographic Discourse of the Other: Conceptual and Methodological Issues. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne 2009, p. 76
  4. ↑ Jürgen Osterhammel, 2007, p. 93f
  5. ↑ Maja Bilic, Susanne Haldrich, Urte Paul: Dangerous tigers. (No longer available online.) MDR / LexiTV , February 27, 2016, archived from the original on March 9, 2016 ; accessed on March 8, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mdr.de
  6. ↑ Krishna Ramanujan: Study of man-eating snakes: Snakes are predators on, prey of, and competitors with primates. Cornell Chronicle, December 13, 2011
  7. ↑ Missing man found dead in belly of 7m-long python in Indonesia: Report. The Straits Times, March 29, 2017
  8. ↑ Martin Paetsch: Hungry Lions: "Humans are two-legged sources of protein". Spiegel Online, January 17, 2003
  9. ↑ Adalbert Erler: Peacelessness and Werewolf Belief. In: Paideuma: Mitteilungen zur Kulturkunde , Vol. 1, H. 7, September 1940, pp. 303–317, here p. 308
  10. ^ William Knighton: The Man-Eater. In: Ders .: The Private Life of an Eastern King. Together with Elihu Jan's Story or The Private Life of an Eastern Queen. Oxford University Press, London 1921, pp. 96-108 ( at Internet Archive )
  11. ^ Neil Clarkson: Horses as Meat-Eating Killers? The Long Riders Guild Academic Foundation