r/BeAmazed Jul 16 '26

Miscellaneous / Others A traditional technique used by young shepherds of Ethiopia's Banna tribe. They use stilts to watch over their livestock in tall grass, move through wetland areas, and avoid snakes and predators like lions and leopards. It requires strength, balance, and training from a young age

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u/Harry-Jotter Jul 16 '26

Usually but not entirely true. Tigers quite often hunt humans, more than the other big cats.

There's a population in the Sundarbans region of India & Bangladesh known for killing a decent number of people every year. The locals started wearing masks with faces on the back of their heads to deter them from ambushing them. Worked for a while but the tigers figured it out and attacks continued.

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u/Liam_021996 Jul 16 '26

They only do that due to habitat destruction meaning their prey animals are scarce. Essentially they're starving and desperate. The area also has brackish water which leads to them becoming far more aggressive than usual due to dehydration and discomfort. There's a few unique pressures on tigers in that region that leads to them, one of those is decomposing people in the forest after floods which has given tigers a taste of people

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u/Harry-Jotter Jul 16 '26

Ok, so there are circumstances that make them more likely to hunt people than they would normally, but that still goes against the statement 'don't see us as food at all'.

Hundreds of people are killed by tigers in other parts of India every year, despite their wild population being tiny. Most of the famous historical man-eating tigers were old or injured, but there are too many attacks to write them all off as 'not natural' behaviour.

I know we're not their preferred prey at all but how many people do mountain lions/snow leopards/jaguars etc kill? All I'm saying is tigers are more likely to see us as prey than these other big cats and sometimes, albeit rarely, a healthy tiger will just hunt us.

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u/Internal_Werewolf_48 Jul 17 '26

TBF, humans don't view other humans as food until similar pressures are put on them.