“An eye for an eye”: blood feud against crocodiles is accepted in Indonesia (5 photos)

It's great that we don't have crocodiles. But in Indonesia they are commonplace, as is the commonplace of arranging a bloody vendetta according to the old rules against the crocodile race if they attack someone. This is especially common in rural areas.





A CROCODILE GOT CAUGHT

The Biggest Crocodile Revenge

This practice became widely known when one of the crocodiles from a crocodile farm killed one of the residents of Java who came to Sorong. His friends were so furious that, according to tradition, they organized a military campaign against the crocodiles from the farm. Since there were quite a few of them, 300 crocodiles were killed in one evening in revenge.

At the same time, a man from Java himself wandered into a crocodile farm in search of grass for his cattle. And he himself got bitten by a whole bunch of crocodiles.

Why crocodiles are not a pity

In Indonesia, it is easy to come across not just a crocodile, but also a crocodile farm itself, where animals are bred for their skin and partly for their meat. The hostility towards crocodiles, which have been attacking children of villagers for centuries, is so high that often, when a wild crocodile attacks, pogroms still happen at the nearest farm. And the "domestic" crocodiles sit and do not know that they will soon pay for the hooliganism of their wild brother.



I had to cut out a huge pile of dead crocodiles from the photo

Indonesia is home to four species of saltwater crocodiles, including some of the largest breeds in the world. So, cases when a person meets a crocodile and it ends in being killed and eaten are far from rare. And before, they were completely commonplace.

That's why living next to a crocodile farm for Indonesians is like living on a powder keg. They believe that every now and then, a dozen will escape because of a flood. And by the way, this has already happened in history!





But is it legal to kill small crocodiles?

From 2000 to 2018, more than 250 cases of crocodile attacks on people were recorded. Most of the cases were accompanied by revenge and beating even innocent crocodiles with sticks.

Pythons are also avenged

Giant pythons also live in Indonesia. Although people are not their usual diet, they can sometimes eat a small woman. And in such cases, the python is cruelly killed by local residents, and along the way - all the pythons that they meet.



That same python-attacker, it is also very hard for him

Perhaps this is an ancient way of regulating the population and an attempt to live in harmony with nature. Every time one of the ancestors was killed by an animal, it meant that there were too many of these crocodiles, and they had nothing to eat and nowhere to live. And then the relatives of the deceased killed ten such animals in order to maintain the old balance and free up hunting grounds so that the crocodiles would not bother people.



A funny problem in Indonesia, a lot of tires are thrown into rivers, and many crocodiles walk around with collars. But if the crocodile is big, it is already dangerous for it

So the culture of revenge has survived to this day, but now with an aggressive, irrational content.