How to Behave Around Crocodiles

Here is the good news that runs beneath everything else in this book: the changes that save lives around crocodiles are, for the most part, free. No money at all. They cost no money, require no new equipment, and can be adopted this very day by anyone, anywhere, no matter how poor the village or how remote the river. Safety around crocodiles is overwhelmingly a matter of behaviour, and behaviour is the one thing over which even the most resource-poor community has real power. This chapter is that power, set out plainly.

Stay back from the edge

The most protective habit is also the simplest: keep away from the immediate water's edge whenever the task allows, and never turn your back on the water while you are close to it. The kill zone is the narrow margin within a body length or two of the bank. A person who fetches water with a long-handled container, or who stands well back and lets a bucket down on a rope, or who keeps a metre of dry ground between themselves and the lip of the bank, has removed themselves from the place where nearly all attacks happen. Distance is the cheapest form of armour there is.

Vary the time and the place

A crocodile learns patterns. If you bathe at the same rock, or draw water at the same step, at the same hour every single day, you are teaching the animal exactly where and when to wait. You are, in effect, scheduling yourself as a meal. One of the most powerful things a person or a whole community can do is to break that predictability: to use different points along the bank, to change the hour of daily tasks, to make the human presence at the water irregular and unrehearsed. A crocodile that cannot predict you is a crocodile that cannot easily ambush you.