thumb|275px|The Tsavo Man-Eaters on display in the [[Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois]]
The Tsavo Man-Eaters were a pair of large man-eating male lions in the Tsavo region of Kenya, which were responsible for the deaths of many construction workers on the Kenya-Uganda Railway between March and December 1898. The lion pair was said to have killed dozens of people, with some early estimates reaching over a hundred deaths. While the terrors of man-eating lions were not new in the British public perception, the Tsavo Man-Eaters became one of the most notorious instances of dangers posed to Indian and native African workers of the Uganda Railway. They were eventually killed by Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, who wrote his account of his hunting experience in a semi-biography The Man-eaters of Tsavo.
Today, the Tsavo Man-Eaters are the most widely studied man-eating pantherine cats given their behavior of hunting humans as a pair and dental injuries reported in one of the lions, a cause commonly attributed to big cats turning to humans as prey.
Historical information
Initial killings
As part of the construction of a railway linking Uganda with the Indian Ocean at Kilindini Harbour, in March 1898, the British started building a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya. The building site consisted of several camps spread over an area of , accommodating the several thousand workers from India. The project was led by Lieutenant-Colonel John Henry Patterson, who arrived just days before the disappearances and killings began. During the next nine months of construction, two maneless male Tsavo lions stalked the campsite, dragging workers from their tents at night and devouring them. There was an interval of several months when the attacks ceased, but word trickled in from other nearby settlements of similar lion attacks. At the end of the crisis, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, Lord Salisbury, addressed the House of Lords on the subject of the Tsavo man-eaters: