But are they the vicious man eaters they are portrayed? After some research I’m afraid I have to say, not really. On returning home Roosevelt wrote about these fearsome fish, unaware that the event had been largely set up for his benefit.Īnd so the piranhas fearsome reputation went global. An unfortunate cow was then pushed into the water at which point the piranhas lived up to their reputation and promptly stripped it to the bone. The men had blocked off part of the river and starved the piranha for several days. But, as with many myths there is a grain of truth and much of the legendary reputation of the piranha can be traced back to a single incident.ĭuring a visit to Brazil, and the Amazon, by the American president Theodore Roosevelt local fishermen set up a spectacle involving piranhas.

Well, it turns out that most of the stories about piranhas are a little exaggerated. And that anyone falling into the Amazon River is as good as dead when these vicious fish are around. Now we all know that piranhas can strip a man to the bone in 30 seconds. In this article I’m going to find the deadliest of all these man eaters and look at some of the most disturbing habitual individual killers. Whilst rare, there have been a number of high profile man eaters, many occurring within the last 100 years. However, there are still far flung places and environments beyond the control of man, where even today, man-eating animals roam wild, stalking human prey as a between meal snack… Thankfully, since then things have improved somewhat for most of us – getting hit by a bus is probably the modern equivalent of being torn apart by wolves. Back in prehistoric times being eaten alive by some sort of ravenous beast was an everyday risk.

Anaconda eating human