Carnivores show a strength in diversity, with their fascinating social systems and different hunting behaviours. Numerically, however, they are weak, compared with other animals. Nevertheless, despite their small numbers, they have an effect on people that is out of all proportion to their abundance. In order to analyse this in some detail, I will start at the darkest, most horrifying and negative side of our relationship with the animals, that is their predation on us. They can be very dangerous enemies.

For obvious reasons conservationists often deny that large predatory animals actually kill people, but there is ample evidence that such indignant denial is nonsense. We will see in this chapter that there are considerable numbers of carnivores that actually prey on us. The details of such predation are often anecdotal, and I will present them as such, but these occurrences are nevertheless real, and as my former teacher Niko Tinbergen used to say, many anecdotes make a statistic.

The stories are bloody, and some readers may be put off by the gory detail. Such a reaction is part of our anti-predator behaviour. But I think that the pattern of predation is important, as is how common the incidents are, because this is what makes up the threat which, in evolution, has shaped our response to predators. Amongst other things, we want to know whether any group of carnivores is more of a threat to us than others and if so, how these animals operate.