Study- Lion legend may be more myth than meat

CHICAGO -- The legend of the man-eating Tsavo lions, reputed killers of 135 people, may have more myth than meat to it, a study says.

The two lions, now stuffed and on display at Chicago's Field Museum, probably killed no more than 28 people, said Julian Kerbis Peterhans, an adjunct curator at the museum and professor of natural science at Roosevelt University.

Not only that, it isn't all that unusual for lions to eat people, he said.

"For most of their history, extinct and living humans have represented little more than a vulnerable, slow-moving source of food for big cats," he said.

The legend

Legend has it that the two lions killed and ate 135 construction workers building a bridge in Kenya in the late 19th century.

Workers built thorn fences and kept campfires burning for protection, but the lions kept treating the construction crew as a buffet. Eventually, the workers revolted, fleeing Tsavo and halting construction.

Lt. Col. John Patterson, an Irishman who was chief engineer on the project, killed the lions in 1898 and wrote a best seller about his exploits, "The Man-Eaters of Tsavo." The story was told in the 1952 movie "Bwana Devil" and again in the 1996 film "The Ghost and the Darkness."

Tale grew taller

Kerbis Peterhans and Tom Gnoske, a Field colleague, have published a study in the Journal of East African Natural History that suggests the tale grew in the telling.

The study says Patterson gave three different figures (larger each time) for how many people the lions had devoured before he tracked them down and killed them.

The study also says that, contrary to popular belief, it may not be so aberrant for lions to feast on people.

Once they establish a pattern of preying on humans, the study says, lions pass strategies for hunting them, such as never hitting the same place two days in a row, onto their offspring.

The authors also said people may have unwittingly stoked the Tsavo lions' appetite for human flesh through local burial practices during a smallpox outbreak that killed hundreds of Indian laborers.