ABSTRACT
Large animals, wild and domestic, should be treated with respect; they may not be as tame as they appear. Lions, leopards, hyenas, domestic dogs, jackals, wolves, elephants, rhinos, hippopotamuses, buffaloes, domestic cattle, domestic and wild pigs, ostriches and even rams have been responsible for occasional human deaths. In recent months, two campers in Kenya have been seized by the head and severely mauled by hyenas while sleeping in the open. Sharks kill about 50 people each year. Crocodiles (Figure 20.1) claim many human lives but in Africa hippopotamuses are thought to kill even more people. Recently in Kenya a man swimming to retrieve a duck he had shot was killed by a hippopotamus. It is extremely foolhardy for travellers to bathe in rivers regarded as dangerous by the local inhabitants. A Peace Corps worker in Ethiopia did this in 1967 and was promptly killed and eaten by the resident crocodile. More recently, two British girls were killed by crocodiles in Tanzania and Kenya. The Nile crocodile Crocodilus niloticus – a threat to human lives (D. A. Warrell) https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781315063621/3d535cd9-a6ad-4748-a69a-eef01cc4a032/content/fig20_1_C.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
