When your safari guide tells you not to go outside of your tent at night, you should always respect this advice. Night is the right time for predators like lions to hunt. Most accidents in Tanzania happen in the last hours of the day or the beginning of the night.
This is shown in the peak appearing on the right of the graph I borrowed from a scientific study titled “Fear of Darkness, the Full Moon and the Nocturnal Ecology of African Lions” and published in Plos One by Craig Packer, Alexandra Swanson, Dennis Ikanda and Hadas Kushnir.
They have looked at lion-involved accidents in Tanzania statistics. They have drawn a few conclusions:
- Fear of darkness is there for a reason.
- Attack rates double during the 10 days following a full Moon.
- North Tanzania is a lot safer.
- Lions are dangerous.
- Human beings are not well equipped to fight one or more lions.
