Man-eater Monday: Here be Dragons

In July 1974 an elderly Swiss baron walked into the hills of Komodo and did not come out. What we chose to believe about his death says more about us than about the dragons.

High on a ridge on the island of Komodo there stands a small cross. The inscription is plain enough — he loved Nature throughout his life — and it marks the last known whereabouts of Baron Rudolf Reding von Biberegg, a Swiss aristocrat in his seventies who, on a July morning in 1974, went walking among the largest lizards on Earth and was never seen again.

The bones of the story are these. Von Reding was part of a small tourist party that had sailed across from Flores to see the dragons in the flesh. By one account the group had spent the morning enticing the animals with a goat carcass, the better to watch them feed, before the baron peeled away to make his own way back to the boat. By another, he stumbled and hurt his knee on the trail, and his guide left him where he sat to go and fetch help. The two versions agree on what mattered. When the party returned, the baron was gone. More than a hundred people combed the island over the following day. Miles from the path, high in the hills, they found his glasses and his smashed camera. Nothing else — no baron, no body, not a scrap. He is remembered as the first European ever devoured by a Komodo dragon.

It’s that word European that ought to catch in the throat.

The counted and the uncounted

Von Reding was not the first person taken by a dragon on Komodo. He could not possibly have been. People have lived alongside these animals for as long as there have been people on these islands, and the accommodations they make tell you everything. Villagers on Komodo and Rinca do not wander into the grasslands alone. For generations they threw the old, toothless dragons the heads and hides of butchered deer — a kind of tribute, a peace kept by feeding the very thing that might otherwise feed on them. You do not build those habits around an animal you consider harmless. You build them around one that has, within living memory and long before it, killed people you knew.

None of those people got a cross on a ridge. None of them got a line in the Washington Post. They died, if they died, uncounted and unrecorded, and the tally that Western readers know — the handful of tourist-era deaths and maulings logged since 1974 — begins precisely at the moment a titled European joined the list. Von Reding is famous not because his death was the worst or the first, but because his was the death that got written down. The dragons had been man-eaters all along. We simply hadn’t been paying attention to the funerals that came before, and most of the ones that came after.

We thought we could pet them

To understand how a whole hemisphere managed to overlook this, you have to go back to a photograph.

In 1927 the first two live Komodo dragons in Europe arrived at London Zoo, into a purpose-built Reptile House designed by Joan Beauchamp Procter — the zoo’s first female Curator of Reptiles, a woman of formidable talent and fragile health who would be dead within four years, at thirty-four. Procter took one of the dragons, Sumbawa, entirely to heart. She walked it around the grounds like a dog, occasionally steering the two-metre lizard by its tail, and in 1928 she scandalised a Scientific Meeting by bringing it along to eat chicken and eggs from her hand while she stroked its head, all to prove the beast was no monster. There is a photograph, published in one of her own papers, of Sumbawa beside a small child who is patting it on the head as one might a Labrador.

This was the settled Western picture of the Komodo dragon for the better part of the twentieth century: a torpid, obliging curiosity, slow and rather lazy, safely behind glass or, if you were Joan Procter, on the end of a lead. It was a picture built almost entirely from captives — sick, sluggish, half the size they reach in the wild — and from the theatrical mythmaking that had named them in the first place. The very phrase “Komodo dragon” was a piece of showmanship coined by an American expedition in the twenties whose specimens helped inspire King Kong. We invented a dragon for the cinema and then, having got a good look at the real thing dozing in a zoo, decided it wasn’t so fearsome after all. Both pictures were wrong. Neither had much to do with the animal that hunted the hills of Komodo.

Everything we didn’t know we didn’t know

Here is the genuinely humbling part. The most basic facts about how this animal makes more of itself, and how it kills, are more recent than most of the people reading this.

Take reproduction. In 2006 keepers at Chester Zoo watched a female called Flora — who had never so much as met a male — lay a clutch of fertile eggs. The same year, a London dragon named Sungai did the same, and the two cases were written up together in Nature. Female Komodo dragons, it turns out, can reproduce alone, through parthenogenesis, and the offspring they produce this way are all male, which means a single female washed up on an empty island could in principle lay eggs, raise mates from her own hatchlings, and found a whole population from scratch. Chester’s Kevin Buley reached, almost word for word, for the line Ian Malcolm delivers in Jurassic Park: it is, he said, nature finding a way. A film about resurrected reptiles breeding when they were never supposed to had beaten reality to the punch by thirteen years.

Then there’s the bite. For decades the received wisdom held that a Komodo dragon’s mouth was simply so thick with septic bacteria that a single bite doomed its victim to die of blood poisoning days later, the dragon ambling along behind to collect the body. It’s a wonderfully grim story, and it’s largely wrong. In 2009 a team led by Bryan Fry identified genuine venom glands in the lower jaw — the toxins drop blood pressure and prevent clotting, so the prey bleeds and slides toward shock. Later work went further and questioned whether the mouth was even especially dirty to begin with. So the science of how this animal actually reproduces, and how it actually kills, is younger than a blockbuster from 1993. We were letting toddlers pat them on the head decades before we had the first clue what we were looking at.

And we did not even know, until relatively recently, that they can swim — strongly, between islands, diving several metres down.

Back to the ridge

Which brings us back to the baron, and to the theory, still politely offered, that no dragon was involved at all. He was old, the argument runs, and unwell; perhaps he simply died out there, or met with more ordinary human misfortune, and the reptiles are merely convenient.

I don’t buy it, and I don’t think the evidence asks us to. That theory is a fossil of 1974 — a relic of exactly the misjudgement this whole story is about. It comes from a decade that thought these animals were slow, lazy zoo-pieces; that had never heard of their venom; that did not know a startled clutch of tree-dwelling juveniles, bolting for the branches to avoid being eaten by their own elders, might send a nervous old man stumbling off the path and straight into the territory of the larger, patient, opportunistic adults; that did not even credit the beasts with the ability to swim. Set the dismissal against what we now know, and it is the dismissal, not the dragon, that looks like the wild assumption.

An elderly man, injured or frightened, alone and immobile in the hills — that is not a puzzle to a Komodo dragon. That is an invitation. His glasses and his broken camera, and nothing else at all, is not the scene of a quiet natural death. It is the signature of an animal that eats bone, hide and hoof and leaves almost nothing behind. We will never be certain, because there was nothing left to be certain with. But on the balance of everything we have learned in the fifty years since — most of which the men who shrugged at his disappearance did not know — the baron who loved Nature throughout his life was very likely taken by it.

The cross on the ridge gets that much right. It just doesn’t say by what.

Man-eater Monday: The Beast at the School Gate

On January 14th, 1991, near a High School in Boulder, Colorado, Scott Lancaster went for a run and didn’t come back. He was 18. It was the first recorded fatal mountain lion attack on an adult in the United States in over a century, and the first ever recorded fatality in Colorado. Yet, everything that preceded it meant it should never have been a surprise.

A Town That Loved Its Lions

Boulder, Colorado, sits at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. It has earned a reputation as a liberal, outdoorsy, environmentally conscious city that had, by the late 1980s, cultivated a particular relationship with the wilderness on its doorstep. Nature was not something to be feared or managed. It was something to be celebrated, protected, and welcomed. Its herd of deer were prolific and welcomed by many, even when they strayed into gardens.

When mountain lions began reappearing in the foothills and open spaces around the city, rebounding after decades of persecution and bounty hunting, many residents greeted the news with similar delight. These were apex predators, returned to their ancestral range. It was, surely, a conservation success story. Perhaps at the time, the link to the significant and incredibly tame deer on their doorstep, had not been made.

What it was, in reality, was a slow-motion disaster that David Baron would later document with forensic clarity in his book The Beast in the Garden — a narrative that traces the paved-with-good-intentions road from Boulder’s love affair with its lions to the death of a teenage boy behind his high school.

Less than Subtle Warning Signs

The escalation began quietly. On February 8th, 1989, a mountain lion snatched a cock-a-poo named Fifi from the porch of the McCain family home. Bernice McCain hit the lion with a broom, twice, but it didn’t flinch. It backed up, took the dog over the fence, and was gone.

Wildlife specialist Michael Sanders considered this among the first true escalations in lion behaviour in the area. The lion had not fled from a human. It had simply ignored her.

That same year, Rob Altschuler, a member of the Boulder Emergency Squad, was monitoring an area in the aftermath of a wildfire, when a mountain lion approached him with unsettling confidence. He retreated to his Chevy Blazer — a vehicle with orange flashing lights running, the kind of presence that should, in theory, have sent any wild animal in the opposite direction. The lion was unmoved.

The dogs kept dying. On November 30th, 1989, a Highland Terrier was attacked despite sharing a pen with a much larger Great Dane. The lion had already visited the pen earlier and left a small wound on the terrier, one the owners had assumed was caused by the other dog. It came back to finish the job. The Great Dane was not a deterrent. Nine days later, an 85-pound Doberman was mauled so severely that the veterinarian who treated it described the dog as a pin cushion, owing to the number of puncture wounds. A German Shepherd followed. A black lab. Then others.

By February 1990, there had been enough incidents that the Division of Wildlife sponsored a public meeting in Coal Creek Canyon. The intention was practical: advise residents on how to safeguard their pets and property. What happened instead was a glimpse into the fatal blind spot at the heart of Boulder’s relationship with its lions.

Those who had lost animals found themselves on the receiving end of hostility from their neighbours. The message from a vocal portion of the room was clear: people needed to adapt to the presence of mountain lions, not the other way around. There was a strong anti-kill sentiment, as one might expect. But beneath it lay something more troubling — a failure to reckon with what these animals actually were. Not symbols. Not neighbours. Apex predators that were running out of reasons to be afraid of people.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Lynda Walters expressed frustration and jealousy when her father, Bill, spotted a mountain lion, from his car. “I wish I could see one”, she had said,

She got her wish on June 2nd, 1990. Lynda was a medical student and studying hard. She gave herself one daily reward – a 5pm run. She was jogging through Dry Gulch, near Canyon Drive, when she encountered not one, but two mountain lions.

The first she spotted on a bank, just fifteen feet from her. She raised her arms and yelled, intending to drive the cat away. It didn’t budge. Then she noticed the movement in her peripheral vision. A second cat was moving in behind her.

She threw rocks. She stood her ground. Eventually, the only option left was a tree, and she climbed it.

One of the lions climbed after her and clawed her leg. She stomped on its head.

Lynda eventually broke a branch and fashioned a makeshift spear, using it to keep the cats at bay while, below her, they waited. She was in that tree long enough for the light to die. In the darkening canyon, above two mountain lions that showed no inclination to leave, she listened to the not-distant sounds of civilisation – of cars passing on the road, a dog barking and children playing in a nearby sub-division.

Lynda later said she imagined her own death many times over, expecting at any moment that the animals would come up and take her.

What saved her was a deer. It appeared across the creek, making its way through the brush. The cats caught its scent, abandoned their interest in Walters, and slipped away into the dark to stalk it. She climbed down and ran.

The lions that stalked Lynda Walters were not aberrations. They were the product of years of habituation: a generation of animals that had grown up in and around human settlement, learning that people did not pose a threat. Boulder’s open spaces had become, in effect, a nursery for large predators with no fear of the species they lived alongside.

Scott Lancaster’s Final Run

On January 14th, 1991, Scott Lancaster, 18 years old, went out for a training run around the trail circuit at Clear Creek High School. Scott was a keen athlete and cyclist, training hard. With a free period to burn late in the day, Scott took advantage.

He borrowed the gym kit of his locker share, James Valdez, and the running shoes of another friend, Eric Simonich. He headed out into a beautiful winters’ afternoon. As he began his run, he waved at a teacher before veering off onto the hillside, following a route carved out by him and his ski-team buddies.

His route took him past the windows of a fifth-period English class, and the students inside watched him go by. He put on a show for them, making like he was out of control with wobbly legs and arms. His friends cheered and laughed, anticipating his next run past. They knew he usually ran several laps of around fifteen minutes each.

Scott didn’t come round again.

At some point in the next few minutes, within a few hundred yards of his friends in the classroom, Scott was knocked to the ground and killed. It was a cold, calculated, brutal, and efficient attack. It is thought the loss of blood from the wounds made it relatively quick and painless.

When Scott failed to return, initial suspicion, albeit briefly, fell on the idea that he might have simply left. Absconded. But Scott’s family knew better. He would never leave his beloved custom bicycle behind. His friend James Valdez opened their shared locker and found his own gym clothes gone and Scott’s street clothes still inside. He had gone out, and he had not come back.

Sheriff’s deputies searched. Volunteers combed the area. Dogs scoured the hillside. For nearly two days, there was no trace of him. It was Steve Shelafo, a 28-year-old emergency medical technician, who found him.

The mountain lion was still there, guarding the body, when Shelafo arrived. It was shot dead at the scene after a short and hectic chase. The animal was a young, adult male, approximately 100 pounds. An autopsy revealed fragments of human heart in its stomach.

Scott Lancaster was the first adult killed by a mountain lion in the United States in over a century. He was not though, as Baron’s account makes searingly clear, an unforeseeable victim of a random wild encounter. He was the end point of a trajectory that had been visible for years, to anyone willing to see it.

The Myth of Wilderness

Baron closes his account with an argument that has only grown more relevant in the decades since: that what killed Scott Lancaster was not simply a lion, but a myth: the idea that wilderness is a pristine, self-regulating thing that humans can live alongside without active management, without accepting the responsibilities that come with sharing space with large predators.

Boulder had created something that looked like a wild landscape but functioned like nothing that had existed before: a place where apex predators learned that humans were harmless, where the social structures that once governed the boundary between human settlement and wild land had quietly dissolved, and where the consequences of that dissolution were still, somehow, a shock when they arrived.

The lion that killed Scott Lancaster had likely never learned to fear people. Why would it? Nobody had ever given it a reason to.

In the 35 years since, there have been eleven more recorded fatal attacks. The lesson Boulder failed to learn in 1991, that coexistence with apex predators requires honesty about what they are, has not notably improved with time. We are still, by and large, a culture more comfortable with the idea of wilderness than with its reality.

Man-Killer Monday: Osama Bin Laden – The Elephant of Sonitpur

For this week’s Man-eater Monday, we’re deviating slightly into a more niche area – that of individual animals that have killed people, seemingly deliberately and consistently, but not with the intent of consuming them nor necessarily even being a predatory species. Enter a name known around the world, given to an animal usually internationally adored.

Between 2004 and 2006, in the Sonitpur district of Assam, a lone bull elephant was blamed for the deaths of at least twenty-seven people.

He did not start out as a named villain. But his unprecedented reign of terror did begin with unmitigated attacks akin to those of a terrorist.

A labourer killed near a tea garden. A villager trampled close to the forest edge. Someone walking home at dusk who did not return. At first, these were tragedies folded into a region long accustomed to uneasy co-existence with elephants. But the deaths did not remain isolated. They accumulated.

By the time officials concluded that a single tusker was responsible, the pattern was impossible to ignore.

It was then that the elephant was given a name heavy with the politics of the time.

They called him Osama Bin Laden.

The Landscape of Conflict

Sonitpur is not wilderness in the romantic sense. It is a mosaic of tea estates, villages, secondary forest and fractured corridors. The boundary between cultivation and jungle is not a line on a map; it is a living seam where elephants and people move within metres of one another.

Elephants have used these routes for generations. Long before rail lines and plantation grids, herds moved seasonally through what is now farmland. As forest has thinned and been divided, those routes have narrowed but not disappeared.

A solitary bull navigating this terrain does not simply wander into conflict. He encounters it repeatedly.

Adult male elephants are more prone to risk than matriarch-led family groups. They move alone. They raid crops. They approach settlements under cover of darkness. During musth, a periodic hormonal state marked by surging testosterone and heightened aggression, a bull can become more volatile, less tolerant of disturbance, and more forceful in asserting space.

In a compressed landscape, force carries consequences. In this setting, a solitary adult bull can become highly dangerous.

Twenty-Seven Deaths

At least twenty-seven people were killed over roughly two years. That figure appears consistently across regional reporting and official statements from the period.

These were not predatory killings. Elephants obviously do not consume human flesh. The deaths occurred during close-range encounters – trampling, crushing, and sudden aggression in shared ground.

But repetition changes perception.

A single fatal encounter is tragedy. Repeated fatal encounters become something else. Fear shifts from circumstantial to anticipatory. Villages alter routines. Workers hesitate at dusk. Forest paths grow tense.

The elephant was described as large, solitary, and unusually aggressive. Witnesses spoke of sudden appearances and little warning. In rural districts where livelihoods are already precarious, such unpredictability erodes more than confidence. It erodes normality.

By 2006, pressure mounted on authorities to act decisively.

The Hunt

Forest officials identified a specific bull believed responsible and launched operations to track and eliminate him. Public assurances were made that the threat would be addressed. There were reports that the elephant had been located and shot. Other accounts suggested he had retreated into deeper forest.

What is clear is that after 2006, the killings attributed to this individual ceased.

What is less clearly documented in accessible public archives is a definitive, widely cited confirmation of his death. That absence does not negate the official efforts made, nor the likelihood that a targeted animal was killed. It simply reflects the uneven nature of record-keeping in regional conflict cases. If the elephant killed was the animal responsible, he had, for some reason, wandered over fifty miles from where he’d last been encountered.

For the communities of Sonitpur, however, the outcome was measured less in paperwork and more in silence. The attacks stopped. And that distinction matters.

Naming the Enemy

The name “Osama Bin Laden” did more than identify a problem animal. It framed him within a global narrative of terror.

The early 2000s were shaped by anxiety and the language of unpredictable threat. To attach that name to a wild elephant was to translate ecological conflict into something deliberate and ideological. It suggested planning. Malice. Intent.

But elephants do not operate within ideology. They respond to pressure, proximity, memory, and stress. A bull in musth does not wage war. He asserts space in the only language available to him… size and strength.

The name belonged to human fear, not elephant cognition.

Man-Killer

The elephant of Sonitpur sits uneasily within the category of killer animals. He did not shift diet. He did not stalk as a predator does. Yet twenty-seven deaths over two years place him alongside other animals whose repeated fatal encounters alter public memory.

The comparison reveals something important.

In classic predator cases such as the Champawat tiger and the Tsavo lions, it is injury, age or prey scarcity can drive a carnivore toward habitual human predation. With elephants, the mechanism is different. The deaths arise from collision rather than consumption.

But the emotional result for communities is similar. Repetition breeds myth. And myth simplifies cause.

Compression

Human–elephant conflict in Assam did not begin in 2004, and it did not end in 2006. Railway strikes, retaliatory killings, electrocutions and crop destruction continue to shape the region’s uneasy coexistence.

The Sonitpur elephant did not emerge from wilderness untouched by human systems. He moved through a landscape already compressed by agriculture, infrastructure and settlement. Every tea garden and railway line narrowed the margin for avoidance.

Twenty-seven deaths are not a rumour. They are recorded loss. But beneath the number lies a structural tension: one of the largest land mammals on Earth navigating corridors increasingly designed without him in mind.

When that negotiation fails, it fails violently. The elephant known as Osama Bin Laden was not a terrorist. And he was not a monster in the way folklore demands.

He was a bull in a fractured landscape.

And in Sonitpur, between 2004 and 2006, that fracture cost twenty-seven lives.