Tsavo Man-Eaters

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The Tsavo Man-Eaters were a pair of large man-eating male lions in the Tsavo region of Kenya, which were responsible for the deaths of many construction workers on the Kenya-Uganda Railway between March and December 1898. The lion pair was said to have killed dozens of people, with some early estimates reaching over a hundred deaths. While the terrors of man-eating lions were not new in the British public perception, the Tsavo Man-Eaters became one of the most notorious instances of dangers posed to Indian and native African workers of the Uganda Railway. They were eventually killed by Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, who wrote his account of his hunting experience in a semi-biography The Man-eaters of Tsavo.

Today, the Tsavo Man-Eaters are the most widely studied man-eating pantherine cats given their behavior of hunting humans as a pair and dental injuries reported in one of the lions, a cause commonly attributed to big cats turning to humans as prey.