My grandfather in his youth in Queensland worked for a while hunting crocodiles, to sell the pelts.<p>A dog would be tied to a tree down by the river. The men would camp nearby. The dog would be heard barking, and men, armed with ropes, would pounce on the crocodile and circle its jaws with rope. Then tie it up and eventually shoot it so it could be skinned. The dog would most often survive. The crocs in those parts apparently loved dogs, and would come a way from the river to find them.<p>The ropes on jaws worked, as Bite force strong down, not so much up.<p>My grandfather would often remind me: you cannot outrun a croc on land.<p>This story is from the 20s and 30s, last century. My grandfather’s beautiful old house in Queensland, which his family sold sans sentiment, had a full crocodile pelt rug on the floor, among many other marvels.<p>I treasure many memories in my youth in that house of those marvels.
From Wikipedia:<p>> In his 2011 analysis of the Burma campaign, the historian Frank McLynn challenged this interpretation, saying,<p>> Most of all, there is a single zoological problem. If 'thousands of crocodiles' were involved in the massacre, as in the urban (jungle) myth, how had these ravening monsters survived before and how were they to survive later? The ecosystem of a mangrove swamp, with an exiguous mammal life, simply would not have permitted the existence of so many saurians before the coming of the Japanese (animals are not exempt from the laws of overpopulation and starvation).<p>> In 1974, a journalist, George Frazier, reported having asked the Japanese War Office about the crocodile attack and being told that they could not confirm that it had happened. In 2016, Sam Willis, a historian, reported that he had found documents indicating that the Japanese soldiers mostly drowned and/or were shot and that crocodiles scavenged on their corpses afterwards.<p>> In 2000, a herpetologist, Steven Platt, visited Ramree Island, where he interviewed residents who had been alive during the war and who had been forced into slave labour by the Japanese; they "unanimously discounted any suggestion that large numbers of Japanese fell prey to crocodiles".
Crocodiles are scary. I remember reading a short story as a young man where a heart surgeon discovered crocs had over centuries, developed a chronic cardiac condition that left them comparatively sluggish and 'weak. He kept operating on them, fixing the problems until a few survived the surgery. As they recovered and grew bigger and stronger, they developed protuberances on their shoulders and a hard pointy plate at the end of their tail. You can see what's coming - they eventually turned into dragons.. They story was told in retrospective, from the safety of underground caves where what was left of humanity lived now..<p>Always crossed my mind when I see one :)
>dozens of crocodiles attacking the soldiers en masse, and appearing out of seemingly nowhere to drag off some poor soul. The nights were said to have been filled with dire screams, gunfire, and the sounds of animal attacks.<p>Sounds like a metaphor for a team of unknowledgeable developpers stepping into the realm of concurrent code.
I used to live in Uganda.<p>We took a trip to (what, at the time was called) Murchison Falls. That's a big waterfall on the Nile River. We came at it from the north, so we were at the base of the falls.<p>The pond at the bottom has sandbar islands all around, and they are <i>covered</i> with monster Nile crocs, which are damn near as big as salties.<p>Scary beasts, and <i>fast</i>.
The event was far worse than this article makes out. There were sharks aswell. That should give an idea of the environment those men were in. Waist deep in sea water, in a dense swamp, pitch black, being killed by sharks and crocs while dehydrating
In Australia, there have been cases where fishermen have disappeared from docks high up from water leaving behind their tackle. Don't dangle your legs over a dock.<p>It is also unwise to sleep on a lonely beach.<p><a href="https://www.rarebookcellar.com/pages/books/67453/hugh-edwards/crocodile-attack-dramatic-true-stories-of-fatal-and-near-fatal-encounters-between-humans-and" rel="nofollow">https://www.rarebookcellar.com/pages/books/67453/hugh-edward...</a><p>Salties can snatch a bird in flight.