THE LION 
but when several lions attack an animal together, they bite it all over, 
and sometimes take a long time in killing it. I think that lions, as a rule, 
when attacking horned animals, try and seize them by the nose with one 
paw in order to prevent them from using their horns, for if they did not 
do so, they would often suffer severely when attacking such animals as 
sable and roan antelopes or any of the oryxes. Horses, donkeys, and zebras 
are almost always killed by a bite on the back of the neck just behind the 
ears, and a young elephant, from whose carcass I drove a lion immediately 
after it had been killed, had been bitten in the throat. According to my 
observations in South Africa, lions, after having killed an animal, were 
accustomed to first tear open the carcass at the flank and eat the skin 
and thin layer of flesh covering the entrails and paunch, which they then 
pulled out very neatly and cleanly, and, having dragged them away to some 
distance, covered with earth and grass, which they scratched up and threw 
over them. Then they ate the kidneys, liver, heart and lungs and whatever 
inside fat there might be. After this, they again tore the carcass open at 
the anus, and ate all the soft meat of the buttocks. Lions tear off and 
swallow whole great lumps of meat with the skin attached. They never 
crunch up big bones, but when an animal they have killed is fat, they will 
chew and swallow the soft bones of the brisket and the ends of all the 
ribs. 
Being essentially game -killers, and therefore generally avoiding those 
parts of the country which have been settled in by either white men or 
natives, man-eating lions are fortunately not as common in Africa as 
are man-eating tigers in India. Still, man-eating lions have occasionally 
made their presence very disagreeably felt in almost every part of Africa, 
and will doubtless continue to do so as long as the species exists. The 
case of the man-eaters of Tsavo, which were responsible for the deaths 
of twenty -eight Indian coolies working on the Uganda Railway, is known 
to every one; but even more destructive animals have existed whose history 
has never been chronicled. In 1886 a single lion is said to have killed and 
eaten thirty-seven natives in the neighbourhood of the Majili River, a 
tributary of the Central Zambesi, and very many other man-eaters have 
killed quite a number of human beings before their careers were ended. 
In fact, a certain proportion of lions — fortunately not a very large one — 
always has been, and always will be, man-eaters in Africa. 
In discussing the subject of man-eating lions, Dr Livingstone wrote, 
many years ago: “A man-eater is invariably an old lion, and when he 
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DD 
