I n a tiny village in rural Assam, two terrified
children will tonight sleep in a tree house. It doesn't matter
how much their mother scolds them; there's no way they're
going to bed down there. Not after what happened. They can still
remember that night, of course - being picked up by their mother,
and how hard she covered their mouths with her hands to stop them
screaming. They can remember the other sounds, too. The
elephants had come in from the forest again. Then they saw one, a
vast dark hulk looming out of the black towards their door. Their
Dad tried to push it away. That's when the elephant carried him
round the side of the house and killed him. Elephants
haven't always behaved like this. But in recent years, in India
and all over Africa, too, some menacing change has come over them.
And not just elephants - it's almost any species. This
disquieting pattern has only recently been detected, in part because
it is so disparate and weird. But it's now widely accepted that
the relationship between humans and animals is changing. One of the
world's leading ethologists (specialists in animal behaviour)
believes that a critical point has been crossed and animals are
beginning to snap back. After centuries of being eaten, evicted,
subjected to vivisection, killed for fun, worn as hats and made to
ride bicycles in circuses, something is causing them to turn on us.
And it is being taken seriously enough by scientists that it has
earned its own acronym: HAC - 'human-animal conflict'. It's happening everywhere. Authorities in America and Canada
are alarmed at the increase in attacks on humans by mountain lions,
cougars, foxes and wolves. Romania and Colombia have seen a rise in
bear maulings. In Mexico, in just the past few months, there's
been a spate of deadly shark attacks with The LA Times reporting
that, 'the worldwide rate in recent years is double the average
of the previous 50'. America and Sierra Leone have witnessed
assaults and killings by chimps who, according to New Scientist,
'almost never attack people'. In Uganda, they have started
killing children by biting off their limbs then disembowelling
them. There has been a surge in wolf attacks in Uzbekistan,
Tajikistan, Russia and France. In Australia, there has been a run of
dingo killings, and crocodile violence is up. In Beijing, injuries
from cats and dogs have swelled by 34 per cent, year-on-year. In
America, the number of humans killed by pet dogs has increased
sharply since 2000. In Australia, dog attacks are up 20 per cent. In
Britain, nearly 4,000 people needed hospital treatment for dog bites
in 2007, a figure that has doubled in the past four years. In
Bombay, petrified residents are being slaughtered in ever-increasing
numbers by leopards, leading J. C. Daniel, a leopard specialist, to
comment, 'We have to study why the animal is coming out. It
never came out before.' In Edinburgh, in June, there was a
string of bizarre fox attacks - a pensioner was among the victims.
In Singapore, residents have been being terrorised by packs of
macaques. Sharon Chan, a national parks official, told reporters,
'It's a very weird situation.' The numbers are
disturbing enough, but the menacing changes in behaviour are
especially worrying to scientists. In Australia, the biologist Dr
Scoresby Shepherd - who pointed out that in areas where shark
attacks used to happen every three or four decades, they are now
taking place at least once a year - has suggested that sharks are
switching their prey to humans. In Los Angeles, Prof Lee Fitzhugh
has come to the same conclusion about mountain lions. In San
Francisco, a spate of sea lion assaults lead one local to comment,
'I've been swimming here for 70 years and nothing like
this has happened before.' In Cameroon, for the first time,
gorillas have been throwing bits of tree at humans. They're
using weapons against us. It's easy to see why some
suspect revenge. The theory that the animals of the three elements
are conspiring against us gained popularity in 2006, when the
Australian television presenter Steve Irwin was speared through the
heart by a stingray off the north Queensland coast. In the
aftermath, the phrase 'freak accident' was used in news
reports. When, just six weeks later, the same thing happened to
James Bertakis, of Miami (he lived only because, unlike Irwin, he
didn't pull the barbed sting out), people started wondering.
Then, in March this year, Judy Kay Zagorski was boating on the
Florida Keys when a stingray leapt from the water and fatally struck
her in the face. |
