Hesbon, our first cook, was close to seven feet tall and a really bad thief. In Africa, two incidents taught me about the need for both compassion and intelligence while dealing with those who work in our homes to help us live easier. When push comes to shove, though, ’servants’ are inevitably scapegoats, permanently flawed and guilty as charged even before the charge is known.

The usual Indian attitude towards domestic help is casual disdain, imperiousness and intolerance of even minor infractions. In Kenya, I had a large stone cottage with a vast garden and more house help than I’ve had before or since, including a driver, a nanny, a housemaid, two watchmen, a cook called Hesbon and a 28-year-old gardener called Albert. Few words are as casually derogatory as servants to describe someone who just happens to have been born too poor and disadvantaged to own your house instead of working in it. His book, The Man-Eaters of Tsavo (1907), inspired three Hollywood films: Bwana Devil (1952), Killers of Kilimanjaro (1959), and, more recently, The Ghost and the Darkness (1996) in which he was portrayed by Val Kilmer.Lesson number one, of course, is that you never ever call them that.

After many attempts and near misses, he killed the first lion on the night of December 9, 1898, and the second one on the morning of December 29, narrowly escaping death when the wounded animal charged. Patterson, who led the construction of the railway bridge over the Tsavo river, was determined to hunt down and kill the lions as many workers had begun to flee the area, putting the railway project - and his own career - in jeopardy.Īn experienced tiger hunter from his military service in India, it still took him several months and four rifles to bag his prey. She thinks the bone-crunching sound that Patterson noted was, in fact, the work of hyenas. Larisa DeSantis, a palaeontologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, believes the lions were simply being opportunistic, targeting humans because they were in plentiful supply, easy to catch, and had soft flesh. His conclusion that the lions became man-eaters because of bad teeth is not universally shared, however. “The second Tsavo man-eater had minor injuries including a fractured upper left carnassial and subsequent pulp exposure, although these types of injuries are fairly common and were unaccompanied by disease.” The pronounced toothwear and extensive cranial remodelling suggests that the lion had broken his canine several years earlier,” writes Patterson. “One lion (the first Tsavo man-eater), with a broken canine, developed a periapical abscess and lost three lower right incisors. In an analysis published in Scientific Report, he cites evidence of dental disease in the man-eating lions. Picture: Bruce Patterson and JP Brown, The Field Museum The skull of one of the Tsavo man-eaters shows evidence of dental disease. Patterson, curator of mammals at the Field Museum in Chicago, which holds the lions’ stuffed remains, says their diminished capacity to chew tough hides of their usual prey of zebra and wildebeest may have led to them hunting humans. He also estimated that the number of humans they ate was not 135 but 35. Why they took to hunting humans has been a matter of scientific debate for decades but the matter has now apparently been solved, while at the same time putting part of Patterson’s account in doubt.Īccording to scientist Bruce Patterson (no descendant of the British officer from Longford), the lions were unlikely to have been able to crunch any kind of bones - human or otherwise - because they had rotten teeth. The man-eating behaviour was considered highly unusual for lions.

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