From: swood@vela.acs.oakland.edu (Scott Wood - EVENSONG)
Subject: MANEATERS: (Introduction) by Peter Hathaway Capstick
Organization: Oakland University, Rochester MI.
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 23:05:55 GMT

A while back I made reference to a serious of books by Peter Hathaway
Capstick detailing his hunts on animals that had obtained a habit of
eating man.
I picked one of the books up the other day and found the introduction
to be quite interesting, and thus am posting it here.

From the Book:  "MANEATERS"  by Peter Hathaway Capstick
		illustrated by Leon E. Parsons
		Copyright (c) 1981 by Peter Hathaway Capstick
		Petersen Publishing Company
		Los Angeles, California

==============================================================================

                                INTRODUCTION


     You would probably not have let him date your daughter; I doubt
you would have lent him carfare. We don't know all that much about him
except that he lived in the vicinity of a cave in South Africa that
somebody named Swartkrans about a million years after something
grabbed him one dark night, killed and almost surely ate him. He was
an australopithecine, literally a southern ape-man, a youngish
specimen who, among all the scraps we have unearthed of his fellows
shows one unique feature: he was killed by a leopard and probably
carried, limp and bloody, to the cave where he was devoured. How can
we be sure? Easy.  The twin fang marks produced by the death-bite of
the leopard are clearly shown through a section of skull. There is no
sign of healing, so we know the bite was the cause of death. Perhaps
what is even more darkly interesting is that, except for the fact that
it's fossilized, that piece of skull could be a week old. Leopards,
you see, haven't changed their style one bit in a million years....
     The question of why animals eat men has been one of more than
casual interest to humanity as long as we have struggled to survive
over those forces that threaten us, one of which is the man-eater of
one form or another, even another man. Logically, a convenient point
to start this discussion would be a consideration of the different
broad classifications of man-eating and the animals who perform such
unlikely (?) behavior.
     A word of my proposed direction and the parameters of this book
would also be in order at this time.
    Man-eating is still a highly charged issue among people who have
one or another emotional stake in wildlife behavior. For example, a
scientist, naturalist or preservationist who has dedicated much of his
life to the salvation of one or another of the great predatory
species, perhaps the tiger or the leopard or, as is the current rage,
the wolf, would be hard-put to admit, let alone develop the theme in
any books he writes that his darling species has a greater or lesser
tendency to eat people. Most books created on this defensive basis
contain chapters that thoroughly attempt to discount any possibility
of man-eating beyond, perhaps, the admission of one or two "rogues."
Of course, this works both ways. Many of the great tiger, leopard and
wolf hunters, to use the same examples, tend, possibly for reasons of
moral justification, to try to point up the worst features of the
species as a man-eater. Both writers are guilty of rampant
humanization of animals, calling them on one side "wise" or
"understanding," "affectionate" or "loyal" while the negative reviles
them as "sneaky" or "bloodthirsty" or "cruel." None of these are, of
course, true except in our imagined perception of human values in
animals. Animals are animals and largely products of accumulated
successful instinctual reaction.
     All this emotionalism makes the researching of a book of this
sort very tricky, as almost all sources can be suspect of shading
their views. I have made every attempt not to fall into this
bamboo-spiked potential pitfall. You will have to judge how fair or
successful I have been.
     Of the man-eating species, the seeming practical point of
beginning would be the "natural" variety, of which there are not too
many. Surely, both the Nile crocodile and the saltwater croc are just
plain eaters of any protein they can catch under most conditions. So,
in all likelihood is the red piranha and very possibly some of the
sharks under some circumstances, although the shark is less certain.
Very possibly the leopard is a "natural." The only way to delineate
one form of behavior that leads to the same end as another style is
consideration of presumed motive. That ain't always easy!
     Next would be the "educated" man-eater, which is a classification
of the higher animals only, traditionally cats, who have been taught
by a man-eating mother to stalk, kill and eat people just as a
"normal" offspring would be taught to kill antelopes and such by a
"normal" lioness. This behavior is most common in lions and tigers;
there is reason to believe that it may exist in the smaller leopard,
but on a much lesser scale.
     Desperation leading to hunger is probably the most common cause
of man-eating, at least among the mammals (it certainly has created a
lot of human cannibals!).  When an animal is forced to a choice
between starvation and gagging down a few evil-smelling people, he may
well choose the latter course. The reason for an animal to become
desperate enough to attack and eat man, which he or she may, from that
point on adopt as a standard, may be any one of dozens. Among these
would be injury to the predator which renders him incapable of hunting
his normal prey either through a hunting accident or by incapacitating
porcupine quills, broken teeth and the like. Age itself can be
sufficiently debilitating to produce a man-eater through hunger
desperation.
     As recently as 60 years ago, many "experts" believed that no
large predator mammal was a man-eater who was not insane, a mental
deviate usually called a "rogue" in the case of buffaloes or
elephants, (non-man-eaters) presumed to lie literally a homicidal
maniac if a carnivore. The accumulation of data has largely eliminated
this concept, but there are still many cases of highly successful
man-eaters who could handily be grouped under this category, and
possibly, in some cases, quite correctly.
     The last traditional grouping of man-eaters may be a large one:
those who learned the vulnerability of man as prey by mistake. I have
purposely left this a broad category, but a normal example might be
for an African tribesman to stumble onto a pair of mating or feeding
lions and be killed in a fit of temper. The first time, possibly
nothing would happen, the body being abandoned. The second time, the
big cat might well realize how easy it was and, tasting blood, have a
bite or two of flesh.  From then on, a full-time man-eater could well
develop; in fact, several high scoring tigers are known to have begun
in this way.
     The obvious abundance of sudden gluts of human bodies in areas of
predator activity such as produced by wars, plague, slaving activities
and simply poor funeral practices can all trigger waves of man-eating
among a wide variety of species, and unquestionably has in the recent
history of the subject.
     A particularly fascinating concept of the relation between man
and those animals that eat him seems to me to be appearing in a brand
new category of man-eater that has emerged only slowly since the turn
of the century, when we first started a worldwide park system,
ostensibly for the preservation of animals and habitat for their
survival and our pleasure and study. What the cumulative effect of
this idea may have been is to effectively, generation by generation,
erase the natural fear that man has spent his whole existence as a
predator to create in the other predators, to abraid the respect that
generations of boldness and weapons use has brought for us in terms of
respect. On the basis that many people are not eaten by predators
because these big, dangerous animals fear man, this edge may be
disappearing as we create an artificial familiarity with our old
enemies. The behavior of bears in Glacier National Park may give one
pause as will the most cursory glance at the recent man-eating
activity of lions in many African parks where, 50 years ago, a rifle
shot could clear square miles of lions. Today, it draws them - and
other predators - who have learned that a shot means food, perhaps a
zebra slain by a ranger or an animal culled from a herd. Man-eating is
on the increase wherever there is increased close contact between man
and the animals capable of eating him. So far as I can tell, this will
only grow worse.
     Despite the seeming increase of categories of man-eating, the
good old-fashioned variety is still the hands down favorite among the
traditional man-eaters. In fact, the following report from the
Columbia, South Carolina STATE by the Associated Press and sent to me
through the courtesy of Lt. Col. W. P. Alston, who has sharper eyes
than do I, is less than a month old as I type these lines. It is a
typical, or, if you prefer, classical pattern of predation on man. It
begins with the headline: LION KILLS, EATS CHILDREN AND MOTHER: and is
dated May 4, 1981.

           YANDE, Zimbabwe (Associated Press) - A lion killed and
        ate three children and their mother, and officials said Sunday
        they feared it may return and strike again.
           Government wildlife officials said the lion disappeared into
        the bush after the attack Thursday in the Dande tribal reserve
        in northeastern Zimbabwe.
           "If we don't get him soon there will be more suffering here,"
        Game Warden Oliver Coltman said. It was Zimbabwe's sec-
        ond attack in two days by a lion, but game wardens shot the
        first after it killed a peasant farmer.
           In Thursday's incident (April 30) the lion was killing chick-
        ens and ducks penned near the family's hut when three chil-
        dren - alone and thinking the animal was a hyena - shouted to
        scare it off, Coltman said. The lion rushed the hut, killed the
        children and ate them, he said.
           When their mother returned later that night the lion, still
        feeding in the hut, attacked her.
           "It killed and ate her as well, then left," Coltman said.

Ah, well, I suppose some things never change.

==============================================================================


swood

-- 
Michigan Archery deer season opens October 1st!!!!!
 I will be sure to be out there, enjoying the sunrise and watching the
  critters roam about.  Whether or not I get a deer, the sunrise will
   still be there, and so will I.
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