Research overview: prey collapse, rinderpest, and the ecological context of Tsavo man-eating

This overview explores the ecological backdrop to the 1898 Tsavo man-eating events, emphasising the late-nineteenth-century rinderpest panzootic that devastated wild ungulates and pastoralist cattle across East Africa. It synthesises arguments that collapsing natural prey, drought, and the movement of caravans carrying enslaved people and dying porters created abundant, accessible human carrion and live prey along the railway corridor. The survey weighs prey-scarcity explanations against dental-injury and individual-specialisation hypotheses, presenting them as complementary rather than exclusive. It situates a famous conflict episode within a continent-scale ecological disruption, illustrating how environmental shocks can precipitate predator behavioural shifts toward people.