“Mama, will you teach me how to kill man for sport?”
"Hippopotamuses are difficult to study in the wild," Slate's LV Anderson writes, "both because
they tend to attack humans who get too close to them and because so much of their lives take place underwater." It's true.
Hippos are bloodthirsty murderers who sometimes viciously maul people, sometimes without any provocation. They're also herbivores. They don't eat the people. They're just huge assholes.
A paper by Adrian Treves and Lisa Naughton-Treves in the
Journal of Human Evolution examined wildlife attacks in Uganda from 1923 to 1994. They mostly focused on large carnivores like lions and leopards, but included some data on hippos too. They found that
hippo attacks had the highest mortality rate of any animal examined.
86.7 percent of the 30 hippo attacks examined were fatal, compared to 75 percent of the lion attacks and only 32.5 percent of leopard attacks.
It's hard to know how many people are at risk of hippo attack, and thus to calculate the rate at which those people are in fact attacked by hippos, but there's nonetheless plenty of cases of hippos killing or severely injuring humans.