The Same Mistakes, Everywhere

A reader who has come this far will have begun to notice something. The countries change, the species change, the size of the animal changes (a four-metre saltie in an Indonesian tin pit, a three-metre mugger in a Gujarati temple tank, a Nile crocodile in a Zambian river, an American alligator in a Florida canal), and yet the story of how a person comes to be taken barely changes at all. Strip away the geography and the same small handful of human circumstances sit at the centre of almost every attack on Earth. A small handful. This chapter gathers them into one place, because once you can see the pattern you can never quite unsee it, and that recognition is itself a kind of safety.

The water's edge, everywhere

The first thread is the most literal. The overwhelming majority of crocodilian attacks happen not in open water but at its margin, the first metre or two of shallows and bank where land becomes water. Around eighty-five per cent of them, as an earlier chapter noted, are ambush predation from concealment at that edge. It is where prey has always come to drink, wash, fish and cross, and it is where every crocodilian on the planet has evolved to wait. Always has been. The most protective habit a human being can form, in any country, against any species, is to keep back from that edge. Nearly everything else in this book is a variation on that one sentence.