Myths That Get People Killed

Every dangerous animal accumulates a folklore, and much of the folklore around crocodiles is worse than wrong. It is lethal. These are not harmless superstitions. They are beliefs that put people in the water at exactly the wrong moment, and they get people killed with grim regularity. The worst of them deserve naming plainly, because a false sense of safety is far more deadly than honest fear.

"The crocodiles here don't take people"

In many communities there is a settled belief that the local crocodiles are somehow different. That they know the people of the village, that they have never troubled anyone, that an attack is the sort of thing that happens elsewhere. Sometimes this belief holds for years, which only makes it more dangerous, because it hardens into certainty. But a stretch of river without a recent attack is not a stretch of river without crocodiles. Rivers change. Populations shift, large animals move in, a dry season concentrates crocodiles and people at the same shrinking pools. The absence of a tragedy in living memory tells you nothing reliable about the animal in the water this morning.