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When people get bad toothaches, they often have to eat soft, easily chewed food．When lions get bad toothaches, they eat people? That' s the conclusion of a zoologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and a dentist who works on carnivores(食肉动物),Lions don’t normally prey on people．Every once in a while, however, a lion will go on a human-eating diet．The most famous such tragedy happened in 1898, when two lions killed and ate 135 railway workers in Kenya．
Examining the preserved skulls(骷髅)of the two big cats, zoologist Bruce Patterson and dentist Ellis Neiburger found that both animals had been suffering from several dental and |aw problems．One lion had three missing teeth and a loose, unsteady lower canine that was probably useless．Canines are pointed teeth that hunting animals use for gripping and piercing prey(刺穿猎物))．
The two lions might have been so badly disabled that they couldn’t bite down forcefully, say the researchers．Consequently, the lions might have abandoned their normal, more difficult prey and turned to humans．"Humans are easy preys, " said Patterson．"We're very slow, we don’t hear very well, and we don* t see very well in the darkness．"
The research calls their idea the Infirmity Theory．It was inspired partly by the work of Jim Corbett, a tiger hunter in India in the 1930s．Corbett was regularly called in to hunt tigers that had been dining on Indian villagers．Time after time, Patterson discovered that the killer tigers were suffering from some ill-healthy conditions．
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