I was recently thinking about instances where animals eat humans.

First, I think the frequency of these events has probably decreased over time. Back in the dawn of human history, there were more opportunities for man-eating animals to devour people. Pretty much every day, really. Even if someone didn’t leave their cave during the day, it was still a cave. No storm doors, no deadbolts–just a big opening that could accommodate most man-eating animals. Hell, the opening was even called a cave mouth; it may as well have had a dinner bell hanging nearby.

Today, there are fewer people living in caves. The numbers are a little higher among flat earthers and anti-vaxxers. But, for the most part, modern humans have doors on their domiciles. Today, most people who get eaten by an animal have gone outside, sometimes right into the area where the man-eating animals are. I’ll discuss shark attacks and zoo mishaps a little later on.

BTW, I use the term “man-eating animals” as a commonly recognized placeholder, not as a form of gender discrimination. Animals that eat people don’t discriminate on the basis of sex. However, it has been proven that men are (on average) greater risk takers than women, so perhaps the use of “man-eating animals” is a warranted distinction.

I don’t have any data at hand concerning the gender statistics of people eaten by animals, and honestly, modern gender classification is more similar to ocean fluid dynamics than old-school M-F. The challenge of performing gender identification for people who have been eaten by animals is more fraught with pitfalls than the classic video game Pitfall.

So, I’m going to use “man-eating animals” from time to time as we go forward. Please know that this isn’t a personal slight: if you are human, you are a potential meal to certain animals, no matter how you choose to identify.

I think it’s important at this point to discuss the distinction between when animals eat part of someone, eat most of someone, or eat all of someone.

Eating part of someone is classic shark attack territory–and leads us to an important distinction: events where an animal eats part of someone, but the person survives. And yes, I’m looking at you, surfers.

Not only do surfers get parts of their body eaten by sharks, many of them go back to the ocean on their boards, stroking through the water minus one arm. This is representative of the “lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice” school of thought, a strategy which starts to fall apart when you continue to engage in the activity, and in the same environment, that resulted in the initial limb-to-food conversion. In other words, “lightning doesn’t strike the same place twice” isn’t a reliable life strategy if you insist on repeatedly running up and yanking Thor’s man braids.

But yes, it is possible to survive being partially eaten by an animal. This is typically a two-phase process: surviving the eating, and then surviving the bacteria the animal’s mouth introduces to your bloodstream while it’s eating you. This second phase can be tricky, as encountering animal mouth bacteria (outside of the liberal sharing done by most domesticated dogs) is much rarer than, say, the salmonella and E.coli found in most bagged salads at your local supermarket.