Tooth & Claw: True Stories of Animal Attacks - Lion Attack - The Lions of Tsavo

Episode Date: April 9, 2021

The much-requested, long-awaited story of the Tsavo lions. These two lions truly caused about as much havoc as any large predators in history, and brought an entire railway operation to a complete halt!  ~~ To advertise on the show, contact us! ~~ Tooth & Claw is brought to you by QCODE. Support the show and get access to an extensive library of exclusive episodes like this by supporting the show on Patreon or joining the Grizzly Club on Apple Podcasts. For the latest updates on the show and all things wildlife, follow us at toothandclawpod.com and social:  Instagram: @ToothandClawPodcast Twitter: @ToothandClawPod Wes: @GrizKid Jeff: @jefe_larson Mike: @mikey3ds                          Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Delivery fees may apply. Hey everyone, welcome back to Tooth and Claw. We finally did it. We're talking about the Lions of Savo on this episode. And we think it turned out pretty great. West did a ton of preparation. He read the book that was written by the guy involved in the story like eight times or something and really got the story down and we're excited to share it with you guys.

So thank you again for all your support, all the ratings and the reviews that you've left us. Of course, special shout out to everyone who's subscribed to us on Patreon. I hope you've been enjoying your bonus perks, the content, the extra episodes that we put out, the early access, all that stuff. And if that interests you, you can join at www.patryon.com slash tooth and claw podcast. And as a special thanks to all our new subscribers on Patreon, stick around to the end of the episode. We'll shout you out by name and give you a little bit more of a personal thank you.

So yeah, if that's you, feel free to stick around until then. Just one quick producer's note, I, uh, me, Mike being the producer, my microphone malfunctioned for about the first five to ten-ish minutes of the episode, so you will not be hearing anything from me for about 10 minutes. Uh, some of you might actually think that's a good thing, but I come back in, so, uh, don't worry, I'm still around. All right, let's get to the story of the Lions of Savo. Hey, guys, tooth and claw podcast here.

we got Mike, Jeff, and Wes. We're back. Who do you think won? Kong or Godzilla. Jeff hasn't seen it yet, but I really wanted to talk about it. Next time we'll talk about it. All right. I don't blame Jeff because I gave him homework to watch Ghost in the Darkness,

not Godzilla versus Kong, and he did his homework. Finally, we're going to talk about the Lions of Savo, which is our most requested story. It's the one that I, from the beginning, was looking forward to this one because it's one of the more famous animal attacks ever. A little bit of a precursor to this, we're going to talk about the movie, which is called Ghost in the Darkness, which I'm sure a lot of you have seen. It came out in 96. I was pretty young, but I was obsessed with animals, and I remember it was like the movie I wanted to see, but mom and dad wouldn't let me see it. And then when it finally came out on TV, I got to see it. And I was

obsessed with it. I watched it like 30 times. It's a good movie. But I really, but I really, loved it so I was kind of shocked when you guys hadn't seen it but I made you both watch it and what did you guys think yeah I loved it you want here whose notes do you want to let's hear your notes all right when Val Kilmer first gets to Africa yeah vows facts giraffes sleep five minutes a day west I have no idea that's what he says I doubt that's true though uh male hyenas eat the young so females are bigger than the males to protect their babies uh males eat the young is that what it's yeah so females are what bigger well i know that hyenas have a matriarchal society the females are in charge and there are a lot of different mammals where the

males will eat the babies to like try and mate with the females again yeah so i wouldn't be surprised if that one's mostly true okay and then hippos fart through their mouth i've heard that before yeah and probably from this movie i bet i mean isn't that just burping? Yeah. I don't know. I think they fart through their butts, too. Okay.

And then there's a different fact from like one of the African tribe men later. And it's lions must have licked his skin off to drink his blood. Can they like lick skin off? They can. Yeah. So they like them and tigers and a lot of the big cats, their tongues actually have little hooks on them. When you look at their tongues up close, there's all these little backward pointing

hooks. And they're really rough. and they can lick fur and skin off of animals. And then they're like, I don't know about the drinking blood thing, but I have read that that is like a possibility that they drink blood. Okay. My last bullet point here is just a question for all of us. Yeah.

Who's the coolest in the movie? Val Kilmer, Samuel, the African tribe leader. Yeah. Or Michael Douglas. I'm going to say Samuel. You want to tell why? Even though he doesn't exist in the book. Yeah.

I just feel like, like, Val is in the movie. He's, like, really cool. And then Michael Douglas shows up and, like, really puts him in his place. And it's kind of weird. And Michael Douglas is, like, way too boisterous and, like, egotistical for me to like him. And he's always talking in parables, you know? He's way too, I don't know. But Samuel just seems very level-headed and great.

I had Michael Douglas as the coolest. Like his intro is amazing His outfit And then like I don't know I just He's kind of a dick though Like the whole time

He's just kind of a dick Also really A lot more considerate Than I thought he would be Yeah Because he's like Only job is to To kill the lions

Yeah But like he wants Val To look good in front of his men I thought he is actually like Pretty considerate And I appreciate that he is using Like native wisdom too His only job is to like hunt.

That's what he gets hired for and he doesn't like killing. Yeah. And then he like forgives Val super fast when Val kind of chokes on killing one. And then, but I do want to point out with Samuel, really cool haircut. Just looked like a donut was on the back of his head. Like I'm not even making fun of him. I thought he looked cool and it was funny. One part that I just loved is when they just had a big victim.

and they're all sitting by the fire. I'm not going to say what that victory is because we still got to tell the story. But they've, like, gone through this crazy adventure together, and Michael Douglas' character turns to Val Kilmer, and he's like, do you think you'll remember this later? Yeah. Of course. You can't remember this.

No, he says, we're going to forget all of this. He, like, we're forgetting all of this. Someday, we're going to forget all this. And it's like, no. No, I love Africa. Yeah. And it's like, yeah, but also like. You've seen it.

dozens of people get killed by lions. Anyway, you know, one thing I loved about it is that King Theodon makes an appearance. Yeah, totally. Bernard Hill. Pre-Lord of the Rings. He's the Lord of the Rings. He gives him the rifle that doesn't work great. Yeah.

That's what he did before he became a horse lord. Okay, so, you know, I don't think we should spend too much time on the movie because the story itself, like, is so interesting. And honestly, the crazy thing to me is this is one of those situations where I don't think Hollywood did the actual story justice. I still really love the movie, but the actual story is even better. 99% of this information comes straight from the guy who was there, John H. Patterson, who Val Kilmer plays in the movie.

He wrote a book called The Man Eaters of Savo, and I read that book three times now, just to make sure I got all the details right. And that's really where I've gotten almost all of this information. A little bit of other stuff I listen to, like, some historical podcasts on it. into like stuff you missed in history class and a few others that talked about some of the background of the Sava region. But as far as like the actual story itself, it's all from John H. Patterson's book, The Man Eaters of Sava. I recommend the book, but I would say it's written from like an English or from a British colonial perspective in like the late 1800s. So there is some like tricky

racial stuff in there that, you know, is pretty problematic now. So you kind of have to read it with that mindset of like there's even some slurs and stuff that he uses for like the Indian workers that I'm not going to repeat but you do like I want to recommend the book but I want to put that caveat on there but I actually was I was somewhat surprised that he didn't seem like he was racist he actually seems like a really good dude Patterson like he seems like he treated his workers really well and that he didn't really see like either the Indian workers or the African tribesmen or anything is different he very much embraced their cultures and their traditions and their and he was a good guy.

So I really liked the book. The story takes place in 1898. The first half of the book is all about this struggle with the lions. And then the second half is all about kind of some other anecdotes that he had in Africa. He really loves Africa. He's very poetic about Africa. And he just kind of has like a really good, fun, positive outlook. It was actually like kind of surprising at times because I had just finished reading this other book called the Tiger,

which is about a tiger attack we're going to cover at some point in Russia. and when that author talks about the people that had been like involved in these grizzly tiger attacks, it's like very, this shook them for the rest of their lives. And this Patterson guy in this book, he's just kind of like, gross. Like he's just very like always the optimist. We'll get into it. Are you guys ready for the story? Yeah.

Let's go that. No, I'm ready. Let's do this. Okay. So again, this takes place in 1898. It takes place in the Savo region of Kenya. and Savo literally means place of slaughter. It got that name because there was like some different tribes that would battle in that area.

It's in southeastern Kenya. It covers an area of about 20,000 square kilometers, which is roughly the size of the state of New Jersey. So it's a really big area in Kenya. In the 1890s, the British railway started construction on a railway there that would connect Mombasa, which is a city on the coast of Kenya, with Lake Victoria, which is way inland. And that railway was going to be called the U.Gugust.

Rondo Railroad. And then they had a lot of different problems constructing this railroad outside of the man-eating lions that we're going to talk about. They got a lot of, a lot of the conscripted work came from India. They pulled a lot of Indian workers over, and they didn't take very good care of these people. It's not that surprising, but these people were essentially conscripted into the British army to come work.

So they worked for like pennies, and they didn't get paid well, and they didn't get treated well. They had terrible water, so they had like bouts of dysentery. they got scurvy, they had near constant diarrhea, which Mikey would love. Jealous. And then also like all the animals that they had working on the railroad, conditions were terrible for them. And Savo's a really hot part of Kenya.

It was like 95% of the animals that they had bought to do this work died. Like almost all their camels, donkeys, cattle, they all died. And those like back then in the late 1800s, like, that's your workforce. Like, you used animals for everything. And so they had huge problems from the start with this railway. It ended up costing four times more than they thought it would. In today's dollars, it costs $500 million. So it's an expensive, huge project.

So John Patterson is essentially our protagonist. He's our hero. He arrived in Mombasa in March of 1898. He's a civil engineer. He'd been the task of overseeing the construction of the railway through the Savo area. Shout out to our dad. Yeah, I was going to say, like, our dad's a civil engineer, but he's kind of the more, like, the kind that's looking at. In Africa.

He's the kind that's railroads in Africa. He's the kind that looks at, like, sewer systems and subdivisions. Anyway, though, his main job was to build some of the bridges and, like, embankments and stuff along about 60 miles of this railway. So what I kind of understood is they would hire someone to do, like, one section, and that person would be in charge of, like, that section. And his section just happened to be this section that's running through the Savo region. He was, like I mentioned, he's like a very cheery guy. He seemed to always kind of be in good spirits. And he boards a train to Savo from Mombasa.

There's like this little anecdote in that part that he's like, yeah, as I was on the train, I saw an ostrich running next to the train at the same speed. So my friend got our rifle and we shot it. Yeah. Just everything they saw. It's just what they did. Yeah. But he completes his journey, gets to the railway in Savo, and it's night, and he's really excited to get up in the morning because he had just gone through some pretty lush areas.

And he was thinking like he was going to come out into this beautiful kind of jungly quintessential African landscape. And he's a little disappointed to wake up because he sees that Savo is extremely dry and it's covered with short leafless trees and acacia thorn bushes. Neither of you guys have been to Africa, right? No. No. Acacia is like the gnarliest bush you can imagine. Is it the ones in the movie that he runs through? Yeah.

The thorns on him don't give at all. I think a lot of our thorn bushes that have long thorns, they have a little bit of bend to them. They're just like so sharp that if you even like barely brush them, they really hurt. Is that what Simba falls into when he's running away from the hyenas? It might be. Acacia's really gnarly. It's like probably the gnarliest plant I've seen that I've seen that I've. actually bumped into that I was just like, wow, that instantly hurts. And so he was like really

disappointed because everything's just covered with like thornbush. It's pretty bleak. And it's more like dry savannah than like lush jungle, which he was kind of hoping for. But he's ever the optimist. He begins work on the various construction projects. Thousands of workers arrive, most of them from India. And construction starts on the 60 miles that he's been tasked with. As you guys are probably guessing, things don't go very well for very long. And he, he, He says in his book, our work was soon interrupted in a most rude and startling manner. What do you guys think that rude interruption might have been? Financial problems.

Hippo fart through the mouth. That is pretty rude. It wasn't. It is fairly rude. You know what? They did have financial problems. Lion? It was lions.

Yeah. So Patterson goes on to say in his book, Two most voracious and insatiable man-eating lions appeared on the scene, and for over nine months waged an intermittent warfare against the railway. At first they were not always successful in their efforts to carry off a victim, but as time went on, they stopped at nothing and indeed braved any danger in order to obtain their favorite food. Their methods then became so uncanny, and their man-stocking so well-timed and so certain of success, that the workmen fully believed they were not real animals at all, but devils in lion's shape. Many a time a worker solemnly assured me that it was absolutely useless to attempt to shoot them. They were quite convinced that the angry spirits of two departed native chiefs had taken this form in order to protest against a railway being made through their country and to avenge the insult thus shown to them. How do you feel about that logic?

I don't, I'm not going to discount it. I know that like for a lot of the, especially in that point, a lot of the tribes people over there probably saw invaders from Britain as being evil. and I don't doubt that they believed that maybe these lions were possessed to help them. Yeah. And I'm not going to say that they weren't. Okay. I mean, I'm a scientist, and that's not what I personally believe, but I'm not going to like... You weren't there to question.

Yeah, and I'm not going to question anyone's beliefs. So were these attacks unprompted, it sounds like? They just kind of... It's crazy. So we're actually going to break this into two episodes. I was going to mention that earlier. Okay. It's going to be our first two-parter.

And the first episode... is going to be mostly story. The second episode is going to be half story and half explanation for why these lions probably did this. I thought you just gave us that. That there were spirits? That they were devils. That's one, I mean, that's one opinion.

But we're going to get in the more scientific side of why they maybe did it. But yeah, so it's going to be a two-parter. And we're going to mostly talk about what actually happened in this first episode. So you also said that the lion's favorite food, it sounded like he was implying that. that the lion's favorite food was humans. It did turn into. Yeah. Okay.

And there's a reason for why that probably happened. Are we pretty tasty? At the end of these lions' lives, they were mostly eating humans. We're really easy to eat. And that's the main thing to think about. But we're going to get into that later. But the main thing is that that's kind of a precursor. He mentioned, like, for nine months, they waged war on this railway.

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Download the Priceline app or visit Priceline.com and book your next trip today. So a little bit about Sabo Lions. I want to paint a really good picture for you guys here. They don't look like your typical lion. Not like the lion from the movie. Yeah, not at all. So when you picture a lion, what's a male lion? What's the defining characteristic?

The penis. I was going to say the main, the big old lion mane. Yeah, they're big old flowing mane. Sava lions don't have mains. The males don't have mains. They have like a really scruffy little one. And it makes them look really foreboding and scary. It's weird.

Because like I think the big flowing main of like a big lion makes it look so regal that there's like this kind of pride to it and it's a beautiful regal animal. And when you take that away, you can still see that it's a male lion because it has these kind of tufty main bits. But it looks like much more brutish and kind of it just looks a lot scarier. I'll show you guys some photos later and we'll post them to the account. It's kind of like in Rocky 3, Mr. T with like his mohaw. and like his earrings and stuff. He just looks kind of like a punk and like just tough. Yeah, they just kind of, they just look a little scarier to me.

They don't look as powerful and as big, but they just look like they're like gutter punks. So they are still African lions. They're the largest predatory mammal in Africa. A pride of lions can take down essentially anything. They don't take down adult elephants, but pretty much any other animal, and usually not hippos or rhinos.

So I guess they don't take down everything. I read that. I read about a crazy pride of lions that were like five brothers and then one like add-on. Yeah. And they would hunt hippos. Okay. Yeah. And there was like a pride that hunts young elephants and stuff too.

But as far as like adult elephants, adult rhinos, they don't really do that. Hippos every once in a while. But pretty much anything else they'll kill. I was surprised reading too. They kill a lot of other lions. Yeah, they do. They're very territorial and very competitive. Adult males weigh on average about.

about 420 pounds. 420. Females, about 280 pounds. Females about 280 pounds. Males can get up to 600 pounds. Males can be up to 10 feet long and females up to 7 feet long. So it's like the upper range, but 420 was like their average. That seems long, or is that like snout to tip of the tail?

10 feet is snout to tip of the tail. Okay. So lions are the second biggest cat. biggest cat in the world next to more tigers. Is there any other type of cat that gets bigger than female lions? Like does a jaguar get bigger than a female line? No, they don't. A thunder cat.

Mains are thought to provide protection for males when they get in fights. So that's why most lion biologists think they even have mains in the first place is to like have extra protection around their neck and stuff. It's like a helmet almost. But because Savo is so hot, scientists think that they just didn't evolve to have mains there because it's just too much of a heat requirement. It just makes them too hot to have a big, huge chunk of fur on their necks. They're stalk and kill predators.

They show a large amount of coordination in their hunts. You know, like one lion will scare a zebra towards another one and they cut it off. They do really cool coordination. They can run up to 50 miles per hour and they can jump 36 feet. Yeah. So, I mean, cats are just... Whoa. So in the Animal Olympics, lion is going to be like top seed.

He's going to be pretty good at everything. Tigers and lions are like, yeah, neck and neck. Lions live throughout sub-Saharan Africa, but their range is greatly diminished from what it used to be. Kenya and Tanzania are still strongholds for lions. There's about 675 lions in the Ambocelli-Savo ecosystem. So that's the ecosystem we're talking about. Currently, there's about 675 lions there.

A tiny bit more. Lions kill an estimated, this is a big range here, an estimated 20 to 250 people every year. The reason there's like such a big confidence interval in that number is because a lot of these people that are killed are in really rural areas were reporting just isn't that great. Yeah, and then Tanzania, which I mentioned has the highest population of lions in Africa. Between 1990 and 2004, just Tanzania saw 593 deaths and 308 injuries from lion attacks.

So they're not an animal that doesn't attack people. It happens. Yeah. Okay. Well, you painted a good picture for us, Wes. Yeah, I think we're ready. Okay, so Patterson was only in Savo for a few days before he heard that these lions had been seen nearby, and shortly after an Indian worker disappeared.

So at this point, he just kind of heard of these lions and then someone disappeared, and some of the workers told Patterson that he had been killed by a lion, but Patterson thought they were just exaggerating and that some other workers, had probably killed him, but a few weeks later he realized he was wrong. One night in early April, 1898, Ungan Singh, who was sleeping in his tent on the Uganda Railway Project, Singh was a Gemadar, which is an official in the British Indian Army. He was an Indian man, but he had worked his way up to essentially what's a lieutenant in that army. And he had been conscripted to help with the construction of the railway, and his specific assignment was

to ensure the well-being of Patterson. So he was essentially Patterson. He was a large, powerfully built man. He was really uniquely suited to this job to be Patterson's bodyguard. And that night he was asleep in his tent with roughly half a dozen other Indian workers. So on that night in April, Singh woke up to find his throat in the mouth of a large African lion. Oh man. One of the other men in the tent remarked later that Singh threw up his arms, yelled out,

let go in his native language, and the next moment was completely gone. They watched him be pulled out from underneath the tent. tent. Oh, wow. And then the other men in the tent listened and they could hear him struggling and screaming outside as the lion killed him right outside of the tent. They woke up. They saw him in the mouth of this lion, him like put his arms around it and yell like, go, and then just get ripped out of the tent and then killed right outside of the tent. It's kind of like the, in the dark night when the Joker's holding Maggie Jelenha. Yeah. And Batman goes, let her go. And then he drops it.

It's not like that at all. Really. Yeah, probably not, huh? No. But he did say let go. Yeah, totally. Or kind of like that song in Frozen, let it go.

Yeah, no, that's good. Those three are exactly the same. That lion did seem to have a flare for the dramatic, though. Probably could see the silhouette through the tent wall. And just letting him wake up before it, like, and like say something before it bites his neck. So I just think about these other guys in there, like waking up and seeing, that happen and just how scared you would be for the rest of your life.

But so the next day, Patterson and then Captain Haslam of the Royal British Army, they woke up to news that Singh had been killed. And Singh was like pretty close to Patterson. They knew each other pretty well. So he immediately went out and tried to track this lion down. And he saw like right around the tent all these lion tracks. And at this point he's like, okay, there actually is a lion. He didn't believe him up until this point.

And they tracked the lion and these drag marks from, Singh's heels and they came apart on the place where he had been eaten and Patterson describes the dreadful scene. He says, the ground all around was covered with blood and morsels of flesh and bones, but Singh's head was untouched aside from puncture wounds from the lion's huge canine teeth. Dude. The head was laying a short distance away from the other remains with the eyes staring wide open with a startled, horrified look in them. So they came upon like this huge kill or eating scene where the lion's actually fed on Singh. They killed him right outside the tent.

And really all they found was like bits and pieces and then his head, two big puncture walls in it. I liked in the movie they find like a scene like that where it's like a 30 foot wide circle of blood. Yeah. And Samuel just like lays a blanket over like one little section, but it's still like this huge blood spot. Yeah. He like puts it over the guy's like femur. Yeah. So like.

That's wild. How do, how would a lion drag someone that big? Oh, it's easy for them. They can drag like a full-sized cow. They just like dragged him by his neck, you think? They could literally pick him up in his mouth and run with him. Really? Yeah.

That's crazy. They mentioned how he had this like horrified look in his eyes, the head. I, you see so many movies of people dying in movies and they usually look somewhat calm, like in death. And then I actually saw Timothy. Timothy Treadwell's autopsy photos. And I've shown him to Jeff. And his girlfriend especially has this, the same. same look in her eye where it's just like total horror.

For the autopsy, they just leave it like that. I saw these photos and I was like, this is insane. This look, it looks like a Hollywood prop from like a horror movie. And that's what I think of when I think of Patterson describing this guy's look in his eyes. It's a terrible way to go. Anyway, I'll skip out on looking at those photos. I'd be happy to show him to you sometime. Well, I wouldn't be happy.

Yeah, sorry, that was weird. Okay, so Patterson again, he's. He remarked that it was the most gruesome sight he'd ever seen in his life. I'd hope so. Yeah. You got to remember, though. He's like second to when my wife gave birth. He's,

this is the most gruesome thing I've ever seen. He's Army. Like, he's been in wars and stuff. And this is the late 1800s. Horror is kind of a normal thing for these guys. Like, they've all seen some pretty gnarly stuff. But he's like,

this is the worst. So they examine the site a little further, and they determined that it wasn't just one lion, but there had been two lions involved in this attack. And they collected the remains as well as they could and buried them, but they took the head back to camp for the medical inspector to examine. Now, you can tell me you're going to get to this later, but from the movie, it kind of seemed like the lions were like Jurassic parking people. What do you mean? Where like one's like...

Tricking on me. And then the other one's like coming up on them. We're going to talk about their hunting strategy a little bit. So Patterson says, I vowed then and there, I would spare no pains to rid the neighborhood of the brutes. I little knew now the trouble that was in store for me, or how narrow were to be my own escape from sharing poor Ungan Singh's fate. Okay. So Patterson's plan is to go up into a tree and hope that these lions show up

and to shoot him from the tree. So the next night he climbs a tree right by the tent where Singh had been killed, and he waited for a turn visit from this lion. And he's joined by a worker that was too terrified to sleep in his tent and wanted just to sleep in this tree with Patterson. So Patterson had a 303 rifle, on a 12-gauge shotgun. And as they sat in this tree,

they were chilled because they heard this ominous roar of the lions approaching and then silence. And then suddenly they heard screams from a camp about a half a mile away. So in the morning, Patterson went to this other camp where another worker had been killed and carried away in the night.

So that night, he set up in a tree next to that camp and he tied a goat to the bottom of that tree, hoping to lure the lions in for an open shot. It is like Jurassic. Park. Yeah, it kind of is. But that night, the Lions moved on to another camp. So once more Patterson heard the screams of dying men in another camp that was too far away. Do they only have one gun? Why not just set up a person at each camp? Yeah, I mean, they're going to get to that. At this point, only a couple people had been killed, and it was an annoyance, but not so much

like a full-on panic. But, yeah, we're going to get to them. It's probably more than an annoyance for some people. For the people, yeah, they died. This is really annoying. Get my head out of your mouth. Saw someone die. And that again is like... Shut up or trying to sleep. I think that some of the politics of this again is like... Patterson was relatively safe.

He had like one of the best secured camps and stuff. For him it was like, dang, I lost another worker. Yeah. And then for the workers, it was like full on unadulterated panic error all of the time. Okay. Again, he misses these lines. They keep moving to different camps. So it's worth mentioning.

that at this point the railway was spread out over a distance of like over 10 miles this construction project and the workers were broken up to a lot of different camps so the lions were really taking advantage of this and rather than to break in the same camp every night they would select new camps each night and Patterson remarked that they had almost a supernatural ability

to avoid whichever camp he was staked out at so maybe they were just like trying to try and different food just different they were like Yeah, like a buffet. Like a buffet. Like a 10 mile wide buffet. No matter, but like, no matter how enticing he made a specific spot for those lions, they would avoid it and attack somewhere else.

So these lions are like really, he's impressed by their ability to evade him. And he's starting to like kind of wonder if some of the supernatural stuff might hold water. Oh, really? Yeah, because like they seem like they're ghosts in the darkness. I mean, they're not like he's not able to get a shot. on them and they keep avoiding him even though he's putting out goats and doing all these really attractive things for lions. Relax and let Ralph's delivery handle your grocery shopping this week.

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And so he just usually would come back to camp pretty dejected and all cut up from these acacia thorns. It's kind of weird that that's his responsibility. Yeah, he's in charge. He's like a civil engineer. Yeah, he's like in charge of everything. essentially like he is the engineer and that's his main thing and that's like kind of plays in when you ask like why aren't there other people out there hunting everyone else was pretty much just a worker like they weren't necessarily trained aside from these indian gemedars and stuff that were

like lieutenants there was a few of them and then he had people that were specifically responsible for bringing his gun to him and stuff and some of those guys were trained to use firearms it's kind of a hard roll to hand out to a worker too. It's like, okay, you're off bridge duty. You're on lion duty now. You're not getting a raise. Totally. Well, and the other thing to remember is these are old guns. These aren't like rapid firing, like quick loading, semi-automatic guns that we have these days. It takes a while to get a shot out and a lot of times they fail. And if you got two lines coming at you, you're not going to feel that confident with one of these guns unless you really know what you're doing. Luckily, he says the lions didn't have 100% success rate. And Patterson spends a little bit of

his book talking about some of their failed attempts. And he treats them like they were pretty funny and served to lighten the tension that was building around the whole construction project. One of these attempts involved an Indian trader who was riding on his donkey one night when one of the lions jumped out of the bush and knocked over the traitor and the donkey, badly injuring the donkey in the process. The lion got tangled up in some of the pans that this guy had hanging from the donkey And it like they got like attached to the lion You know like when a cat gets tangled up in something and it's like freaking out Yeah, that's what happened with this lion and it got really freaked out

It thought it was in a trap or something Yeah, because they were all banging around and it like ran off in the bush and this traitor He like climbed a tree to get away from the lion I'm not sure what ended up happening with the donkey But Patterson talks about this like it was the funniest thing I'm sure this dude was scored for white. Another night, a Greek contractor was sleeping on his mattress when a lion broke into his tent and pulled the mattress out from under him

and ran off with it. So this dude's just like sleeping and suddenly he's on the ground. Pranked. Yeah. Yeah. You think it used the mattress? I wouldn't be surprised. It's comfy.

Yeah. There was a tiger in the tiger story that I'm going to tell at some point. Slept on a mattress one night. Really? Yeah. Anyway, Patterson talks about this Greek guy, and then he's like, unfortunately, he died of thirst not long after when he got lost in the desert. That's a, yeah, kind of a bumer.

Yeah, seriously. That's not one of the funny stories. That is kind of funny. Okay, on another night, a group of workers were sleeping in their tent when a lion jumped on top of it, injuring one man but collapsing the tent in the process. And the resulting chaos, this lion made off with a bag of rice that it had mistaken for a human and then like dropped it later out of disgust. So these were all like the funny stories that he was telling like, oh, here's when the

lion didn't slaughter some of my men. But so Patterson really thought like this helped alleviate some tension, but I'm guessing. That was just for himself. Yeah, it probably, the dudes that were getting killed were probably still pretty tense, I'm guessing. Yeah. So Patterson slept in a big tent with Dr. Rose and Dr. Brock, who were two of the medical doctors on the project as well as their servants and they surrounded

their tent with a boma and aboma you guys saw in the movie it's essentially when you take all of this thorny acacia and you weave it into a fence and you build them really tall and a lot of the Swahili tribesmen and other tribesmen in africa would build those specifically for protection from predators yeah i've seen those a lot before this movie yeah and uh like ace venture a pet detective too yeah yeah exactly which is great. That's some great research. One thing I did want to mention, too, in doing research for this, I learned that throughout

Africa, a lot of the people, the native peoples that lived in Africa, for thousands of years, a main way that they would subsist is by following lions throughout the day and then scaring lions off of their kills. And lions in the day are really pretty easy to scare. You can find a lion that's actually killed something and like on a kill. And these Bushmen or tribesmen or whatever would come in and scare the lions away and take that meat. And that was like a main way of surviving for a lot of these people. And so there's a huge difference between interacting with a lion in the day versus one at night. That's like a completely different animal essentially.

So I just wanted to make a note of that. I was thinking about lions, obviously. Yeah. I think it's interesting, like, compared to other big cats or just pretty much anything but house cats. Yeah. How they just sit out in the open a lot in the day. Yeah. Because, like, tigers are always, like, in, like, grass or something.

Right. And, like, most big cats are always, like, kind of hidden. Yeah. I feel like lions a lot of times are just kind of, like, sitting out in the open. And the reason for that is because they are in prides. And because they're in prides, they can depend on all these other. animals within their group to like hunt and get food for them. Whereas like a tiger or a leopard or a jaguar is almost always hunting because they're

constantly needing to be stealthy because they're only really, they have to worry about themselves and they don't have this kind of extra cushion of like other animals that they can relax for a bit. Yeah. Is the fact that these lions were do performing these are attack performing, I don't know, that's a weird word. Performing attacking these people at night. Is that like an anomalous thing for lions or is nighttime hunting for lions?

No, night time is like that's when that's when they're most active in hunting. Oh, okay. So they built these bomas around their camps. And they also allowed the workers to build bomas around their camps as well. But the lions each night managed to either like find holes or weak spots in the bomas or like just completely jump over them. So every few nights, Patterson would wake up to the news that another man had been killed and carried off. and he's really starting to get nervous about the morale of all his workers, which makes understandable.

But up until this point, he had been lucky because the largest camp in the whole project, this camp called Railhead Camp, was in Savo. So they kind of had these traveling camps of workers, and this really big camp with thousands of workers was in Savo, and that helped all of his workers feel like their odds of being killed were much smaller because even though people were getting killed every other night, It was like, well, there's thousands of workers here, so chances are it won't be me. Yeah.

But this railhead camp finally moved on, and Patterson was left with just a few hundred men, and then suddenly they're like, oh, shit, we're in trouble, you know, because there's not that many of us anymore. Yeah. It would take a lot of other people around me before I started to play the odds game. If there was like a million people in my camp, I'd still kind of be like, I don't know. If you have a one in two thousand chance of being. pulled out of your tent in the middle of the night and like savagely eaten alive by lions,

you're just going to be in a constant. Yeah, it's terrible odds. That's the thing I kept thinking about as I read this book, just like how terrifying this must have been for those workers who are unarmed, totally unprotected aside from like a thorn fence and some fires. And the fact that these lions are just getting through every night, these barriers aren't doing anything. Yeah.

It's like one in 2000 every single day. Right. So like it's a lot more than that, you know. Yeah, and this went on for nine months total. So it was just like, I think it's hard to like overstate how scared these dudes must have been. And Patterson probably not so much because he's like the Great White Hunter, you know, and he had his gun and he was Mr. Adventure and he kind of saw it as this challenge. But to these guys who are just there to make a tiny bit of money to send back to their families,

this isn't worth it. This huge camp with thousands of people finally moves on, and Patterson's left with just like a few hundred people. And they're all essentially camped together. So this led the lines to be much more focused. They're not spreading out over all this like huge distance anymore. They're really just attacking Patterson's men every single night. And panic is really starting to break out, which to be honest, like I'm surprised they've made it this long without full on panic happening. But the men are starting to like threaten to revolt and leave.

and Patterson allows them to build higher Bomas and he allows them to put more fires around their camps and assigned night watchmen and then they also tied ropes to trees and they hung pans and oil tins from them and a guy would be in his tent holding the other end of this rope and all night would just be banging these pans and oil tins together.

I like how you say he allowed them to. It's like, you know what? It's been kind of fun letting you guys die. But I guess I'll let you build Yeah. More safe campground. I think, like, we're being a little hard on Patterson.

He really did care about his workers, but he also had this crazy schedule to keep to. And so building Bomas and doing all that stuff would take days. Oh, I see. And that was the main conflict. It was like, do I let these guys take days off of work to, like, protect themselves? Or do I have to answer to my higher-ups and, like, complete these tasks that I need to complete? But he tended to decide with his workers, to his credit. doing all he could to keep them safe.

Good. All those precautions that they took, the higher bomas, more fires, everything, it helped them feel like they had a little more control over the situation, but it wasn't stopping the attacks. So when this railhead camp left, they left behind a hospital camp that was about three-fourths of a mile from Patterson's camp. And it had a really thick and a really tall boma built around it. And it was like regarded to be one of the better bomas,

but the lions still managed to find a weak spot and get through. it. But the crazy thing is Patterson talks about in his book that the lines like didn't make any noise as they came through these bomas. Even though they're squeezing through tiny little gaps in them and stuff, it was quiet and they could get through them. They're just really good at figuring it out. Kind of like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park. Yeah. No, it's a, it's very similar. So, so one night, a hospital assistant had heard a noise outside and he cautiously opened his tent to look out, only to realize in horror, a huge male lion was standing a few feet away. So the assistant fell backwards as the lion leapt toward him, and at the last second, he was

lucky enough to fall into a stack of medical supplies, which made a really loud, clattering sound, and it scared the lion. Oh, okay. I thought he, like, got wounded, and you were saying he was lucky he fell into the medical supplies so he could just heal himself right away? No, it was because it scared the lion, but yeah, good thought. I'm not surprised. That's where your brain went.

So the lion immediately changed direction and ran to another area of the camp where he had much better luck. He collapsed a tent that had eight injured or sick workers inside. He seriously injured two of them. And then he grabbed a third and dragged him and pulled him through the boma. So Patterson and the workers, they decide to abandon this hospital camp because the lions are now targeting it. And they move all of the current patients and the hospital to a new site that's much closer to the other camps. because the hospital camp had been almost a mile away from everyone else. And they put up a bigger boma, they put up better safety measures,

and then Patterson again climbs a tree by the old hospital camp, thinking that the lions will probably come back there. But again, he makes the wrong move. That night, the hospital water carrier had laid down in his new camp. He's feeling pretty good. He's got this brand new boma. He's got all these fires. He's close to the camp.

And he's relieved because he last night escaped all this pandemonies. him where a lion killed patience, you know, while he was there. Yeah. And he's sleeping with his head near the center pole of the tent. So it's a circular tent. There's a center pole. His head's near the center pole and his feet are out by the edge of the tent. And his feet are pretty much touching the canvas.

And he wakes up in the middle of the night to tugging on his feet. And he's horrified to see a huge lion head sticking out from underneath the tent canvas and lashed onto his feet. The lion starts dragging the man out of the tent and the water carrier screams. and grabs onto a nearby heavy box, which he drags with him until it caught by the side of the tent. He then grabs onto a tent rope, and the lion plays Tugawar with him in the tent for a minute until the rope snaps.

The other workers in the tent... Oh, dude, he had a strong grip then. Yeah, the rope broke. I'm impressed by the guy more than the line. I know, like he grabs this box, and then he grabs the rope. So the other workers in the tent then watched as the fire illuminated as this lion jumps onto their friend, shakes him violently by the throat.

and then he stops screaming. So the lion then picks him up in his jaws, like we mentioned earlier, fully picks him off the ground, runs with him and forces him through the boma, leaving like a bunch of torn clothes and flesh behind. So in the morning, there's all these torn bits of the guy in the boma. Yikes. Yeah. So in the morning, Patterson and Dr. Brock, they follow the trails to the remains,

and very little was left of this dude. His skull, his jaws, a few large bones, a portion of his palm with two fingers. and they sent his ring and his teeth to his wife in India, which apparently teeth was an important thing for some of those people. So the next day they again moved the hospital camp, an even bigger Boma is built, and the lions are seen several times, once trying to attack a worker in the middle of the day,

who climbs up a tree, and then once stalking Dr. Brock. So Patterson and Dr. Brock, they're realizing they got a real problem, you know, obviously. So they round up some cattle for bait, and they hide inside of a supply wagon that night, and they're near this newly abandoned camp where the water carrier had been killed. And they're aiming their guns out into the dark and they can't really see anything.

And they think they hear something approaching. And suddenly they see this dark shadow roaring and jumping at them and they both fire. Oh, geez. And Brock misses, but Patterson thinks he hits the lion. And that was his first personal interaction with the lions. Patterson and the rest of the crew, they then get a break from these lions, which makes me think that he might have actually hit this lion. because months passed with no problems.

They don't have any kind of issues. Patterson knows that they might come back, so he gets to work on building a trap, which is the trap you guys saw in the movies. That's a good trap. Yeah, the trap he builds, it's pretty much like a big wooden sleeper. So picture like a shipping container that's made out of wood,

and it has doors on both sides. And then in the middle, he installed all these metal bars. And so the idea was that there'd be like bait on one side, which would be live men, and then the lion would come in, And when the line comes in, it steps on a spring in the floor that causes the door to fall. And so it's essentially trapped in this compartment. And then the men in the other compartment, separated by the bars, can shoot it and kill it.

So after months, this relative piece is shattered by these all too familiar screams at this point. And the ghost in the darkness had returned. Some of the workers had started sleeping outside because they'd kind of like eased up a little bit. It was so hot in their tents and it was so much cooler outside that they started sleeping outside. And they're beginning to just feel a little bit safer. And then they woke up to the lion, like, forcing itself through the boma. Like, imagine waking up and you see the lion coming through the boma. And it's like, you know, you can see like its determination in its eyes and it's trying to get through all these thorns.

So they begin screaming and they're throwing like sticks and rocks and like flaming sticks at the lion. But it runs into the middle of this group, grabs one of the workers and drags him through the fence. And then the other lion immediately joins them outside the boma. before they had always killed the person and then like take him into the bush to eat him but this time they just ate him right outside of the boma so all these other dudes are there watching as this guy is struggling and then killed and then the lions just sit there and eat him patterson's in his like own little camp away from this and these guys had a few guns and they fired shots towards the lion but they're like terrible aims it's the middle of the night and the

lions like didn't even care they just sat there and ate this guy while they were shooting at him Another thing to remember, too, is with these guns, like, they don't have the same, the bullets don't have the same kind of firepower, too. Like, our bullets nowadays explode and do all these crazy things. Their bullets would just kind of go in. You got to be pretty close. Yeah, so you got a hit in the right spot. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet.

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Yeah. Not only do they see this, but the whole next day this dude's remains are just hanging out outside of your fence. But the next day, he learns that the lions had attacked a camp two miles away. And then once again, they killed and ate this guy right outside of the Boma. So he starts staying up almost every night. He's moving to places where he thinks they're going to show up. But every single night, they're either seeing him and switching course, or he's just feeling like he's really unlucky.

But men keep dying. The lions seem to be taking new victims almost. every night. And in his book, The Man Eaters of Sabo, he writes, In the whole of my life, I have never experienced anything more nerve-shaking than to hear the roars of these dreadful monsters growing gradually near and near, and to know that someone or other of us was doomed to be their victim before morning dawned. Once they reached the vicinity of the camps, the roars completely ceased, and we knew that they were stalking their prey. Shouts would then pass from camp to camp. Beware, brothers, the devil is coming. But the warning cries would prove of no avail,

and sooner or later agonizing shrieks would break the silence and another man would be missing in the morning. That's so scary that the freaking lions were roaring. Like, here we come. Yeah. And then they stop and you're like, shit, they're on their way. Yeah, that's crazy. He recalls a specific night where he's like starting to feel pretty crazy

because the lions are feeling like very supernatural. And he spent all of his free time hunting them. He had like military officers coming out to help him. And like they couldn't shoot him either. And night after night, they're like killing people. So he recalls a specific night where the lions grabbed a man from the railway station and they brought him like close to his tent and ate him right outside of Patterson's tent. Oh, man.

And he could hear like his bones crunching and he could hear the lions like purring the whole night as they're eating this guy. And he said for days, that's all he could hear was the sound of bones crunching and the lion's purring because he just couldn't get it out of his head. Some of the other like guys that were in that camp of this guy that just, died, asked if they could move into Patterson's camp, and he was like, yeah, of course, like, come sleep in here. And then he learned that they left one of their other guys behind who was too sick to leave.

And Patterson was like, what, you slept him? Dude, what? Yeah. And so he gets up and goes to save this guy and goes to their camp that they had abandoned, and the dude had died of fright. He just died. What? Yeah.

Oh, geez. Yeah, because he was so scared to be left alone. How do they know he died of fright? Because he was fine when they left And then like 20 minutes later Patterson went back and he was dead It's like how Padmay dies at the end of Star Wars And she dies because she's sad

Yeah It's the same kind of One's sad and one's fright I see where you're doing Yeah and just saying these things can happen They can happen Yeah and that's a great example Thanks

Yeah So up until this point The Lions had attacked one at a time One would enter in the Boma And the other one would wait out side and then the one that goes in the boma would kill someone and then bring him outside and they would both eat it they were kind of like taking turns so but now they're actually starting to attack together and on the last week of november 1898 they broke into a camp and they immediately attacked

two swahili porters one was killed and eat immediately and the other they could hear groaning for hours so all the workers that are in this camp can just hear this other dude like moaning and groaning and he had been attacked and they were too scared to go out and help because there's like what if the lions are still there but finally they summon up the courage to go help this guy and they found him stuck in the middle of the boma and the lion had tried pulling him through but couldn't get him through and he was rescued but he died from like all these injuries the next day from both the lion and the thorns i'm starting to be more scared of bomas than lions yeah the bomas are pretty this sound terrible yeah so one night the lions attacked and dozens of men swarmed up a tree to

it away and then the tree actually like fell down because too many people went up it and it crashed like down right by the lion but the lion had already gotten someone and he was eating it so he didn't really care that suddenly all these dudes fell out of a tree right next to him another night they made an attack on the largest camp near the savo railway station they quickly caught a worker and dragged him off the camp inspector fired over 50 shots in the direction of the lions and in the morning patterson and this inspector started following the trail of what they assumed to be a hurt lion because it was this weird kind of markings on the ground like it had been trailing a broken limb or something and when they approached the carcass they heard the lion's growl and they ran into the

bush so they scared these lions off the carcass and they learned that what they thought had been like the lion dragging a broken limb was actually this guy's finger marks in the sand from him like them dragging him through the sand and he had been eaten like his legs arm half of his body had already been eaten and they buried his remains so he was dead he was dead but when they dragged him out there he was like yep he's dead so we're coming to the end of part one but the workers had enough this was the last straw for them this was the last straw yeah i mean at this point it took them a while yeah it did but at this point there's not that many of them there's only like a few that are with Patterson and they're getting picked off every night and the lions about the ante

now they're both attacking at the same time and that was just too much so you think they like had they in their mind before though like once they kill 60 of us that's the last straw I'm done you're like one more person I swear I'm out here I honestly I think a big part of it was that now that they're they're attacking together and they're eating the people like eating the people right there I think I'd still rather work there than for like the Amazon workplaces. I don't know. I see what you're saying. The warehouse workers at Amazon.

I was thinking jungle. Yeah, I think you're probably right. You don't have to pee in bottles at least. So on December 1st, these workers start striking. Patterson comes back to camp after burying this most recent victim. And these men told them like, hey, we came from India to work for the government. not to serve as food for lions or devils, and they hopped on the train and they left. That's a strong point they make.

Yeah. And that happens in the movie too. Like at one point they're just like, no, we're done. And they get on the train, they leave. And Patterson's left with a skeleton crew. There's not that many people left and work on the railway stops. So these lions succeed in completely shutting down this railway. And Patterson knows he needs to figure out a way to end these lions or die trying.

So that's what we're going to talk about. in the next episode is how this whole story comes to a conclusion. It's really interesting what happens. But this first half is mostly just to illustrate. These lions are pretty good at what they were doing. They wreaked some havoc. Yeah, it wasn't like a couple people died and they were like, oh, shoot, there's some lions around.

It was a constant, unending terror for these dudes. And it seemed like they were doing everything they could think of to, like, prevent attacks. Yeah. It was just like, they couldn't. There's nothing to do. They couldn't help themselves. Yeah.

And the crazy thing for me is like... From two lions. That's crazy. When you hear a lot of these stories, even from like back in that time, it's like, oh, yeah, someone wandered off at night and they ended up getting killed. But you don't, if you don't have a safe spot, like, if you can't even lay in your tent at night without fear of being pulled out from under your tent by a lion, you would just never be able to relax, ever.

And that's the crazy thing to me is like, there was no safety. There was no sanctuary. there was no place where they could go and like feel like they were ever safe. Maybe like when a different worker is getting actively eaten a lot, maybe they can relax. Yeah, we got like we got 20 minutes to chill. Yeah. Because they're busy. Yeah.

Anyway, that's the first part of this story. Do you guys have any questions so far? It's pretty wild. It's almost repetitive when you read it because it's just like, and then another guy died. Do we know how many deaths we're at around right now? So right now, I don't know exactly how many. Patterson ends up reporting 135 deaths from these lions. But we're going to talk about that because scientists think it's significantly less.

And we're going to talk about the two different kind of ways that they've figured that out. That'll be in the next episode. And that's a really interesting part when we talk about the motives behind these lions and how many people they actually killed. And the science they used to figure that out is really cool. But as far as like these attacks, like I was saying, just very repetitive. Like every night it happens, Patterson goes up in a tree, tries to shoot him, fails, and then it

happens again. It's just really interesting. I mean, it's repetitive in the same way that you read about World War I stories where there's a constant barrage of bombs. And it's like, it's repetitive, but also it is consistently maddening and horrifying. And you're going crazy. You're literally going crazy with fear. Reading this story is just, I just couldn't think of anything that would be more terrifying.

Then just like every night thinking I might get Ian alive tonight. Like there's a good chance of it. It just sounds off. It's like thinking there's a monster in your closet, but they're actually very well could be. Anyway, that's part one. I'm really excited to tell you guys part two, but we're going to do that in a couple weeks. I think we're going to do a couple categories today. We're going to kind of split up our categories between the two episodes.

But are you guys ready? Yeah. I think I am too because I'm tired of talking. Okay. I don't know. It depends which ones we're doing. Okay. I should be ready.

Well, our first one is your favorite lion from pop culture. Nice. Are you ready for that category? Yeah. Okay, let's hear it. My favorite lion is Scar. Same answer. Really?

Scar is super cool. Yeah. I think he's cooler than Mufasa and Simba. I do too. I kind of picture these Savo lions like Scar. Slinkier and their mains aren't as big, but they're like tough. Another shout out I have is in Wild Boys. They have two real good lion episodes.

Where they're in the hammock. Where they're in the hammock with like raw chicken hanging from the hammock and a lion like jumps on them. Or where they're in the zebra costume running around with zebras and a lion comes and like tackles them. Yeah, those were some of the more insane bits from that show. My favorite lion is Lafcateo. who shot back. I don't know if you've read the Shell Silverstein book, Lafcateo, the Lion. Well, I guess there's nothing more to be said then.

No, tell us a little bit about Lofcutting. I mean, you guys know Shell Silverstein, right? It's about a lion who kind of gets put in captivity and put on display for humans. He ends up becoming, like, a really big celebrity. The reason why I asked about his lion's favorite foods being humans is because it confused me because Lafcadio's favorite food is marshmallows. Okay. And he had like a whole suit made out of marshmallows.

Yeah, I wouldn't go off. of that for like yeah cool that's very it's funny it's it's like kids book it's very left field i've never heard of it i love me neither well mine's scar too so i'm not gonna oh should we do you have any shoutouts to other lions uh like aslan aslan's another lion we got scar we got all the other lion king lions the Detroit lions there's a lot of lions lebron james lion tattoo lionel richie That's good All right So our next category is

What would Mike and Jeff do If you were attacked by a lion We're going to say What are you going to do if you're in 1898 And you're attacked by a lion On the Savo Railway camp Okay

I'll tell you You want to say Sure Yeah it sounds like it's pretty much game over But I would I would construct a little Personal portable dome of Boma And just

Carry it over me the whole time. It's not that. Sleep in a boma. Yeah, no, I like that. Like an umbrella maybe. Like, do you have a pole with it and you can just like tuck down real fast? Yeah.

I think we just solved the story. I think that they were getting through the boma. Yeah, but it would probably be like, well, this one's too hard. I'll just grab this one that doesn't have a little personal boma around it. Oh, yeah. Right. All right. Jeff, what would you do?

I mean, it sounds like I just need to climb a tree. Yeah. Pretty much. Or just have like a donkey with a, bunch of pans. Yeah. Just carry a donkey around on it. Yeah.

Okay. I'll make like a little bed on top of the donkey and have a bunch of pans on it. Okay. Well, actually, neither of those are that dumb. Hey. Hey. Here we go. Okay.

There's not too much out there. Well, I mean, there's a lot of people that spend a lot of time around lions, like people doing safaris or hunting or whatever people are doing in the African bush. And they say, like, it's pretty similar. to bears actually. You don't want to run. You never run. You stand your ground, maybe retreat slowly, but you face the line, you clap your hands, you shout, you wave, you try and make yourself look big, do whatever you can to kind of like discourage it from wanting to charge you. They do bluff charges just like bears, but usually they'll stop short and they won't actually make contact. This is a day

too. Like that's an important thing to remind you guys. Like this is if you see a line during the day. you want to avoid mating lions because they tend to be like much more revved up during that time, especially the males. And then you definitely want to avoid lioness with the cubs because they do protect their cubs. And then the main thing is just like avoiding being out at night in lion country because then all the rules kind of go out the window and they're actually maybe going to like hunt you rather than just attack you because they're pissed off at you. So avoiding nighttime is the main thing, but if you actually are attacked by a lion, if one grabs you, there's not much you can do unless you have like a gun or something. Bear spray would probably work on them. But as far as once it's got you, you can try and fight back, but it's probably going to kill you. I try to avoid mating animals as a rule.

Yeah, just kind of awkward. Yeah, it's, it seems like a bit of a, yeah, like you're intruding. Yeah. There's that one story of the guy who pulled a thorn out of its paw, a lion's paw. Yeah. And then the lion and him were like friends after that. Yeah, there was actually a mouse that did it. Yeah, the mouse.

No, there's a story of a guy that did it. It was a little mouse. I promise. Pretty popular little kid's story about a mouse. It was based off a guy who did it in Rome. Or maybe the guy was based off the mouse. Oh, yes. I mean, I don't know what to tell you.

All right. Our last category, or no, we're going to do two more. Listener questions. Jeff, you got listener questions for us? Yes. I don't, so a lot of those stories that come out of Rome aren't real. Okay, I know, but I'm saying that they're, like, it doesn't just have to be the mouse story because there is one with a person too. Okay.

Okay. Fair enough. But there is one with a mouse. Yes. So listener questions. We're starting with two. Patreon questions. Okay.

Kristen Kramer. How do you judge which zoos are more ethical and okay to go to? Yeah. That's a great question, Kristen. If you want a lot of information about this, if, unlike, on my Instagram, on GrisKid, I have a highlight that tells like all the information you need. But a short answer to that is AZAA accredited zoos are usually zoos that have to live up to a certain standard.

So if it's AZA accredited, chances are they're doing, you know, they're hitting that standard to give their animals the right kind of enrichment and enclosures and everything they need to be happy. So I would feel pretty good going to any zoo that is AZA accredited. But check out that highlight on my account and it'll give you a lot more information about how to choose which zoos are okay to go to. All right, from Tammy Tomlinson. Being one of your northern Canadian neighbors, is there any animal specific to Canada? that is rare or not found in the U.S. And maybe even in another province besides B.C. Yeah, I mean, if you take Alaska out of the equation, then there's a lot because they

have like caribou and, well, not a lot, but there's a few other animals too that we don't have. Yeah. They have polar bears. But once you include Alaska, like, we pretty much have everything they have, too. Links are much more common in Canada. Wolverine are much more common in Canada. Canada is like the only place that has spruce.

Spirit bears, really, right? Yeah, they're the only ones with spirit bears, which are, they're just a black bear, a genetic variation of a black bear, but they are the only ones that have them. They might trickle into Alaska every once in a while, but it's mostly Canada. Yeah, it's a good question, though. All right, and then let's get into the Instagram listener questions. Okay, from Nico Yianoni. Wes, can you explain your reasoning for avoiding seafood?

Yeah, that's a long answer to. a really good question. Mostly I just did some research into overfishing and how badly it's destroying our oceans and how quickly a lot of fish stocks are being depleted. And at the time, when I learned about all that, I was like, okay, I got to make smart choices about seafood. But then I found that it was so hard to get good information about what seafood is sustainable. And it just got so complicated that I just decided to stop eating it all together. If you look into the overfishing problem, personally, I think it's the biggest problem facing our planet. So I just couldn't eat seafood anymore.

But I don't judge people that do. But for me, it just was too tricky. All right. So next question. From Brandon Doodle. All right. Do you all watch sports? Yeah

We all really like the Utah Jazz That's probably our favorite We're in Salt See Wait a minute Mike texts me every game And tells me that he hates him So

We do Jeff likes sports Probably the most I don't know Mike and Jeff Mike and Jeff really like sports I'm a sports fan But I'm very casual

Yeah I like mainly football And basketball I'll watch a little tennis. I like mostly basketball. But yeah. All right. From Art is the image of life.

How do you feel about animal crossing having wasp slash scorpions as deadly animals in the game? I've never played Animal Crossing. Have you guys? No. Yeah. It's not for me. I'll just say that. But they have wasp and scorpions as deadly animals.

Yeah. I mean, both of those animals are potentially deadly. They could kill people. So you feel okay about it? Yeah, I'm fine with that. All right. It is kind of funny. The villager gets a big, like, puffy eye when it gets stung by the bees.

It's pretty cute. Okay. From Chels Kubricki, what are your thoughts on invasive species like iguanas in Florida? I mean, they're a huge problem. It's an absolutely massive problem. Aguanas, they're still trying to figure out exactly what kind of issues iguanas are causing, but when you look at like Burmese pythons or Argentine Tagus or some of the animals that are running loose in Florida, they're completely decimating some of the native wildlife there. And they

just don't belong there. So yeah, it's a huge problem. Are there any invasive animals you kind of like that having around? I think a lot of them are really cool. Yeah. Like when I was in Florida, I saw like camellions and all these other animals that are like from all around the world. Yeah. It's really neat seeing them, but they're terrible for the ecosystem. It's like one of the leading causes of extinction is invasives. So you kind of wish that hippos were in Louisiana still? Yeah. Yeah, I guess it's fun to think about.

But it's terrible. How do you, what do we do to deal with the problem? I mean, do you just kill iguanos? Yeah, I mean, if you can get on top of it quick enough, you can like eradicate the invasive before they take hold. but in Florida, for example, like Burmese pythons, there's thousands of them now. And they can't, now they're just managing them.

They're not trying to get rid of them because they just can't. It's impossible. Man. So the key is getting at them quickly, but once they get a stronghold, it's really hard to get rid of them. To be honest, like one of the worst invasive animals out there

are household cats. People let their cats out, and cats just kill billions of birds every year. So cats are like Yeah Each cat kills billions of Cats are one of the worst Like the biggest problems facing birds

And small animals like lizards and stuff too Yeah I saved a bird from a cat the other day Nice It just spooked the bird off And the cat got all mad at me This one I was going to skip But then I thought it might be kind of interesting

Okay Funny From Genicki interview an animal question mark so I didn't really know where he was going with that but where my mind eventually got to is like from tooth and claw podcast if you could interview any of the animals and like actually hear like their thoughts on the attack what story would you want Mo the chimp.

Mo? Oh, man. But, like, from who? From Mo? From Mo? I want to know Mo's story. Not from the chimp that attacked. No, I want to know Mo's story, and I want to know where he went.

Okay. I want to interview the crows. I want to hear their side of the story. How mad they are. Yeah. Maybe it would be less of an interview and more of just kind of like, let's get an understanding here. Let's talk it out, you know? Yeah.

How about you? Maybe the tiger. Yeah. In the zoo. Just like, did you know you could always jump out and you just waited that long? And like, were those kids like, did they really deserve to die? This is going to be a hard hitting interview. Yeah.

This one just kind of made me laugh. Piquet washiere. Why do ducks flap their wings nonstop when they're flying? To stay in the air? No, I get what they're asking. Like some birds can glide and some can't. Yeah. And I'm just guessing that with ducks, like their body weight and the way their feathers are arranged and their types of feathers, they're not gliding birds.

They're birds that have to constantly flap. Like I'm working with Golden Eagles right now and they have huge wings. And like their body weight to wing ratio is like a lot different than a ducks. Yeah. And so a Golden Eagle can just put its wings out and glide for a really long time. But a ducks can't do that. And it's just because that ratio is different in their wing. structure is different.

Cool. Yeah. All right. So our last category we're going to do today is do we like this animal. We're talking about lions. I was that. Yeah. I mean, I think I'm going to guess we all like lions.

I like them quite a bit. I've seen some lions in the wild. It's really like one of the coolest things for me when I was in Africa was waking up early and hearing lions roaring in the distance, like that really like loud bellowing roar that a male lion does. It was just really magical. So I'm a big fan. I like lions. For me with big cats, they're probably like third or fourth.

I like jaguars, tigers, snow leopards, and cougars more. But then it's lions. So fifth? Yeah, they're fifth. Cheetahs? I think I like lions more than cheetahs. Cheetahs aren't technically like big cats either. So I'll go in.

I don't know. I'll go in now. I almost have a three-way tie for my favorite cat, which is tiger, lion, and jaguar. Okay. And right now I'm kind of leaning lion. Interesting.

So here's what I like about lions compared to other cats. I like their roar, like you were saying. Uh-huh. Like every other cat, it's kind of like a row. You know? Tigers have like a real roar. They don't like roar like a lion more. So there's three roaring cats.

There's tigers, lions, and jaguars are the three cats that roar. My top three. Yeah. And all three of those have like a lion more. real roar. Lions have like a really deep bellow. It's like deep. But tigers and jaguars both roar as well.

Okay. Yeah. But I like the lions roar the best. Okay. So do Coopers meow? They, they just don't roar. They like scream. Yeah, that's annoying.

And then like their mains, I just think are so cool. Yeah. I'm laughing at Mike saying that's annoying. Yeah. Yeah, their mains are cool. So, and then like. That's cool. How many people they killed on that railroad.

But, yeah, and, like, Lion King's, like, probably my favorite Disney cartoon. Yeah. So, like, I just really am into lions right now. All right. You're wearing a shirt that's lion colored. But, like, you know, if we do a Jaguar episode, it might change the Jaguar being my favorite. I'm going to rank them nine. Okay.

Overall. Yeah. Whoa. Holy cow. It's the highest one we've ever. We're talking about a lion. We've talked about Chris Bears. Never mind.

I like lions a lot. Jeff took all my reasons for liking lions. Nice. There you go. What about the males just like making the females hunt most of the time? You like that? So not to tread into misogynistic territory. That sounds kind of nice.

Yeah. I mean, not that I want. Like from a laziness standpoint, it just sounds nice being fed. your whole life and like being able to like lay around and do nothing yeah but it we don't need to involve the gender politics of it that what's that Disney movie where it's like lions versus hyenas lion's king no but like the documentary it might not be Disney oh I know you're it's like no I know what you're talking about I can't remember what it's called that one was so cool where like the male lions just like lazy most all the documentary and then at the very end there's like

this hyena finally like these hyenas finally kill like a female lion in their pride yeah and the male lion's like okay we're done just like goes and like so easily and quickly kills like the leader of the hyenas yeah and it's just like feuds over yeah like the male lions don't do much but when they do it's like they put an end to whatever's happening yeah yeah yeah cool well that is part one of two-parter on the lions of savo Next week we're going to come back and we're going to talk about the rest of the story, the motives of the lions, some of the science behind the story, the rest of our categories. And thanks so much for listening, guys.

Please write us a review, give us a rating if you haven't already. That's like the best way for us to get discovered for people to find our podcast is that way. It really helps us a ton. So do that if you haven't already. And if you're interested in more content, our Patreon is still open. We're posting many episodes on there. That's every other week. We're putting stuff on there.

I got a doozy that we're about to record. Yeah, we're going to record. Animals in executions. Yeah, so animals that both were tried in court and then animals that were used to kill people. I think we'll do two separate ones. Okay. Cool. Whoa.

Anyway, the Patreon link is on our Instagram, tooth and claw podcast. And yeah, thanks, guys. Thanks. We'll see it. Okay, like we said, we want to give. you new subscribers to our Patreon a special shout out here at the end so without any further ado let's go down that list we've got maggie duffy margaret langstead isa bush lindsay g carlson tammie tomlinson irene olivieri david allstott amanda manning ellis casey corkron kate havisdos

Jackson Quinn, Marie Hanofan, Keoru Kumano, Derek Knole, Eleanor Abercrombie, Matthew Morris, Abby Meyer, Joshua Saller, and Anne Wimmer. Thank you guys again so much for your support. And now we truly are at the end of the episode. So we'll see you guys later.