Why People Are Attacked

If the rules for staying safe are so simple and so cheap, why do crocodiles still kill so many people in Africa every year? This is the central question of the book, and it carries across every regional edition, because the answer is the same wherever people and crocodiles share the water. People are not taken because they are foolish. Three reasons, and it helps to set them out in order, not of importance, since all three count, but of how hard each is to fix.

These three causes are not peculiar to Africa. The companion editions of this book, written for very different animals on other continents, arrive at the same three, because the pattern is human before it is regional: people are put in harm's way by the absence of safe alternatives, by the gaps in what they have been taught, and by the slow erosion of respect that familiarity breeds. Only the weight differs. In the wealthy parts of the crocodile's range, where wells and bridges are taken for granted, attacks are overwhelmingly a matter of complacency and the occasional lapse of knowledge. Across much of Africa the first cause dominates all others, because here the absence of infrastructure is not an occasional gap but the daily condition of tens of millions of lives.