The tale of Gustave who has eaten 300 humans
ii^ like animal monsters, at a distance. A truly terrifying one has emerged from the vast delta where the brown river Ruzizi flows into the blue waters of Lake Tanganyika. It is a crocodylus niloticits, known as Gustave to the herpetologues who have tried to capture it. It is believed to be about 60 years old (Nile crocs can live to be well over 100) and during the last ten years alone, the locals calculate, it has eaten more than 300 people. In the past crocs longer than nine metres, or about 30 feet, have been recorded, but all were shot when the Nile and territories to the south were explored from the 1880s to 1939. Now that crocs are more or less protected, they are growing bigger again. Gustave is over six metres or 20 feet long, has a vast paunch measuring over seven feet round, and weighs at least a ton. He is expected to grow much longer and heavier and to gobble down many more men, women and children unless the hunters can get him into a specially constructed steel cage, lifted into position by 60 natives. This is the alternative to shooting him, which they are not allowed to do. So far they have been frustrated by the civil war raging nearby and the difficulty in getting permission from the local authorities, such as they are. They are always changing as first one side, then the other, gets into power and sells permits.
Nile crocs have very large brains and, if cleverly handled, can be tamed and taught tricks, a sure sign of intelligence. But their brains also mean they are difficult to catch and ingenious in seeking human prey. Each lives as an individual and has its own territory, which it designates by loud, vibrant roarings, raising its head and tail high out of the water and vibrating its flanks violently — an alarming sight.
When a croc spots a human target, it floats quietly in the river, pretending it is a drifting log. A person who comes too close to the river bank is knocked into the water with a sudden, powerful blow of the tail, then the croc's jaws pounce on his legs and drag him down into the reptile's underwater burrow. It may gobble part of him immediately. The rest is left to rot and becomes soft and disgusting (to us) but a delicacy to the croc. I recall this is what happened, in 1960, to the German ambassador to the newly independent Congo. George Gale, who was there, gave me a graphic description of his misfortune. I rather think they recovered bits of his body.
In the superb manuscript in New York's Pierpont Morgan Library known as The Hours of Henry VIII, painted by the French master Jean Poyet (active 1483-1503), there is a marvellous picture of the giant croc (or Tarasque, as it was called) being destroyed. I have just acquired a facsimile in colour of the complete book and particularly enjoyed this plate. It shows the croc-dragon in the act of chomping up a man whose legs stick out from its cavernous jaws. But Martha, the sister of Mary and Lazarus, captured it by sprinkling it with holy water, then had it destroyed with spears and crossbows.
In those days, of course, man-eating creatures, particularly reptiles, were regarded not just as enemies of humanity but as symbols and agents of the Devil. Virtually all representations of diabolical forces, from Duccio in the 13th century to Old Brueghel in the 16th, had reptilian features. It was not only in man's interests to destroy them, it was his positive moral duty. The amazing thing is that any survived. At my school, Stonyhurst, there was a huge collection of stuffed monsters acquired by an old boy, 'Squire' Waterton, a rich 19thcentury eccentric who roamed the world looking for animals to capture and stuff — he was an expert taxidermist. Sometimes, for fun, he created monsters by stitching together bits of different reptiles, adding exotic features of his own design. Once he captured a cayman or alligator in South America by jumping on its back and lassooing its jaws. He was unusual in that he preferred to bring the creatures back alive, like the showman in King Kong, my favourite movie.
Efforts to preserve dangerous wild beasts by imposing restrictions on their slaughter go back to the 1820s in South Africa, but from the 1950s onwards they have become highly effective, all over the world. In France, for instance, the 1963 Act has doubled the population of wild deer and raised the number of wild boar roaming around the countryside to more than 150,000. Boar are dangerous animals who can rip you apart in seconds using razor-sharp tusks operated by immensely powerful neck muscles. Not a creature you would wish to meet on a walk in the Cevennes. American farmers and hikers, especially in Colorado, the Dakotas and Washington State, have to contend with wolves, which have been turned loose by the deliberate restocking policy of federal officials. They must also watch out for brown bears and grizzlies, now probably more numerous than at any time in record
ed history. Grizzlies are huge, ferocious and incredibly persistent in pursuing humans they regard as enemies — witness that magnificent painting by Charles Marion Russell in the Museum of Western Art in Fort Worth, Texas, 'Crippled but Still Coming'. It shows a badly wounded grizzly determined to destroy its heavily armed cowboy persecutor.
In Africa, laws to protect elephants and other large game have been successfully enforced in some states and as a result their numbers have multiplied and peasant farmers, forbidden to kill them, have suffered. An African elephant can uproot a score of sizeable trees in a day, just to get at succulent young leaves, and even a small herd can totally devastate in an hour a farm it has taken a generation to make viable. I hate the idea of fanatical ecologists, who have never had to gouge a living from the harsh and hostile soil but live easily on government grants and university stipends, bullying the authorities to pass laws which ruin the livelihood of peasants who find it hard enough just to practise subsistence farming successfully. Even worse cases arise when governments back the tourist trade against their own people. In Nepal, to enable six white rhinos to roam, the government cleared hundreds of poor families from an area where their forebears had lived for thousands of years. I am emotionally neutral as between man and the beasts, but elementary morality and Christian faith dictate giving a human soul priority over a dumb brute. Unfortunately TV, among its many other vices, is teaching the gormless, uneducated masses, whose attention is required so that the moguls can sell airtime and amass profits, that all animals, however ferocious and destructive, are essentially the same as pet rabbits. Wildlife documentaries almost invariably ignore the way in which the balance of nature is kept by violence, including the human variety.
People who have to contend with wild animals capable of killing them are usually poor, ignorant, unrepresented in governing bodies and bewildered by the anxiety of the powers that be to preserve the lives of those they regard as natural enemies. The 60 or so village men required to lift the cage designed to house the mass-killer croc Gustave earned a few pence thereby. I wonder what they thought of the rich (to them) white scientists who failed to shoot a menace that has almost certainly gobbled up some of their relatives. Meanwhile, bon appetit, Gustave!
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