“Everybody has got their own lion,” says Richard Field, an African safari guide who survived a lion charge and bite. “It is that hard and painful experience when life gets turned on its head.”
He is a member of Bite Club, an international group of people who have been attacked by a wild animal — the odds of which happening are about one in a million — and lived to tell the tale. Members support each other in dealing with the psychological affects, which are often traumatic and sometimes surface only years later.
Born in Johannesburg, Field was captivated by lions on trips to the Kruger National Park and trained as a guide. On safari in Botswana in 1999, he got out of a vehicle to search for the tracks of a lioness with cubs.
“I was kneeling and heard a rustle. I saw the lioness coming towards me and stood my ground and screamed, but she did not stop. She mauled my head with her claws and had her teeth on the back of my head. I tried to punch her, which was useless.
“I thought I was going to die,” says Field. The lioness let him go when a safari client drove the vehicle at them.
Field’s then-fiancée, Beck — now his wife of 22 years — treated his head wound and dislocated shoulder when they reached safety. His physical recovery was quick. But his mental recovery was not.
“I tried to bury the experience and to run from it and hide from it. I did not tell the story for 15 years,” he said. “I was ‘Richard, the great safari guide and photographer,’ and did not want to be ‘Richard, the dummy who got out of the vehicle and was attacked.’
“I had the experience in a box but eventually it started banging loudly to get out.” When Field decided to write about it, “I was shaking and crying. The hair was standing up on the back of my neck. It was like radioactive waste that had had an impact in ways I did not understand.”
“But now that I was digging in, I found the gold underneath the pain. I rediscovered life, and I view every decision I make through this filter.”
While he could hide his scars under hair, some Bite Club members cannot. They have been torn up by sharks, crocodiles, hippos, lions, wolves and, in one case, a bear, and share a visceral understanding of how it feels, says group founder Dave Pearson.
Pearson, who survived a shark attack, is usually the first person with whom they connect, in hospital or via the private Facebook group he set up. “Bite Club has only one rule: ‘You need to talk’,” says Pearson. “Each time you tell the story, you let go of a little bit of pain.”
His grandchildren are used to visitors with missing limbs or shark tattoos — like the one Pearson has — dropping into his house in the small Australian town of Coopernook. Through talking, they find healing.
“The attacks are rare, but I live with them every day,” Pearson says. “Yesterday I surfed with a fireman who had been involved in a fatal shark attack and we talked about it on the waves. I had dinner last week with a guy who had been bitten by a lion.”
Some people have experienced predator bites without feeling in mortal danger — like Johannesburg Zoo curator Katherine Visser, who was bitten by a young leopard in the late '90s. The traumatised cub had been a few weeks old when it was brought in after its mother died in a trap.
When the leopard was a sub-adult Visser, then a keeper, was removing a piece of leftover rabbit skin from the enclosure and the animal growled at her. “He did warn me not to take his food away but I continued to clean up. Then he came at me and I put out my hand, which is the worst thing you can do. When he held on, I used my other hand to try to free it, and he went for that,” says Visser, whose hands still bear scars.
“I learnt to be careful. There is a huge difference between captive and wild animals, but they will always be wild animals,” says Visser, who castigated herself for a long time.
In Bite Club people can express how they feel without being judged, says Pearson. The group, which is growing, has three South Africans among its more than 450 members.
Australian Justine Barwick, who narrowly escaped death in September 2018 when a shark tore away most of her thigh and severed her femoral artery, said their support was unique. “Nobody else can understand some things, like the sheer power of being hit by a shark. It felt like a freight train.”
She was swimming off a yacht in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park when the shark bit her right leg. “I was in the shark’s home and I’m a visitor there. I’m not angry at all with the shark. I was lucky,” says Barwick, who was saved by timely first aid and a helicopter evacuation, followed by 18 hours of surgery to reconstruct her leg.
“Everything changed after that. Now I’m Justine version 2.0,” jokes Barwick, who celebrated her 50th birthday this month with her husband. A health executive and mother, she says: “It made me realise I’m actually very strong. I’m capable of much more than I thought I was before the shark attack.”
Seven Bite Club members met in person to dive with nurse sharks at the Sydney Aquarium in 2013. “They are the puppy dogs of the ocean but they look ferocious,” Pearson says of the encounter, which was filmed for TV and drew the attention of attack survivors from all over.
A girl who had survived a crocodile attack called him up and joined. “A girl in Canada who had been attacked by a lion in SA, called. She came over and spent Christmas with us, meeting the others over barbecues.”
Trauma survivors can often relate to each other in a way that others struggle to do.
Pearson says: “People say ‘So be it, if I die in a shark attack,’ but it is not like that. I have met hundreds of people who have nearly been taken by a shark and they have all fought with every last breath.
Each time you tell the story, you let go of a little bit of pain
— Bite Club founder Dave Pearson
“People say, ‘Just stay out of the shark’s environment.' But I find a peace [while] surfing that is very hard to find anywhere else.”
Pearson was back in the water 12 weeks after he was attacked.
This week marked the 11th anniversary of his bite, when a 3m bull shark clamped onto his arm and board, pulling him under. After getting free, he tried to swim to safety but was hammered by breaking waves.
Pearson made peace with drowning until he thought about his children and partner, and then fought to the surface for air. On the beach he was stabilised before being evacuated hours later, and his arm was saved in surgery.
But when he went back into the sea, he had to confront his fears. “All my issues used to be washed away in the salt water and now one of my biggest issues is in the salt water,” he says. A surfer for 52 years, he still surfs three to four times a week and is teaching his grandchildren.
Roughly a third of shark-attack survivors suffer post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), according to a 2018 study conducted through another peer-support group.
Pearson says his mental equanimity was shaken when PTSD struck some time after the attack.
• 61: shark attacks
• 214: crocodile attacks
Source: oryxthejournal.org & sharkspotters.co.za
— Attacks in SA between 1949-2016
“I was the happiest guy in the world just to be alive and work was going smoothly, when suddenly it all turned upside down. It brought back all the other traumatic events in my life: the death of my beautiful baby girl when she was 9½ months old ... It was hugely destructive for me, but I’ve turned it into something positive: the time I get to think about Tiah.
“Of all the bad things that have happened to me, the shark attack is not in my top four or five,” he says.
Some survivors have lost their jobs and relationships and fear they are a burden to others, even having suicidal thoughts — which is where Bite Club tries to offer help, he says.
PTSD can also affect rescue crews, first aid responders and loved ones.
“You never know what the person sitting right beside you is going through,” says Pearson. “I don’t introduce myself as ‘Dave, a shark attack survivor.’”
Realising how quickly life could end has enhanced his appreciation of being alive. “You see life is worth holding onto. I see the exact same feeling in people who have survived cancer. The little things mean so much more and the bits of drama are nothing.” He says he is more compassionate and makes time for beauty, pulling over to watch a sunrise.
• USA # 1: 1563 shark attacks
• Australia #2: 682 shark attacks
• South Africa #3: 258 shark attacks
Source: floridamuseum.ufl.edu/shark-attacks/maps/world/
— Shark attacks worldwide from 1580-
An engineer, Pearson maintains schools. His partner, Debbie Minett, cares for the frail and disabled. He crammed this interview in between donating plasma and cooking her dinner. The couple have eight grandkids and are preparing for his father's 90th birthday celebration, now that the pandemic is waning.
“Do you know that song Always Look on the Bright Side of Life?” — an irreverent take on life and death by Monty Python. “That is one of my favourite songs. That is going to be my funeral song,” Pearson says.
“I got a lot more out of the shark attack than I lost.”
WHAT THE SCIENTISTS SAY:
UCT professor Justin O’ Riain, director of the Institute for Communities and Wildlife in Africa
Researchers working on human-wildlife interactions typically characterise incidents involving wildlife attacking people and injuring or killing them as either accidental, deliberate (like Tanzanian lions who have learnt to hunt humans) or provoked (people threatening wildlife or teaching wildlife to associate people with food).
The type of response to such incidents varies. A person who is injured or killed while engaged in their livelihood, for example a farmer working in his fields receives the most sympathy and justification for a retaliation, while a person engaged in recreational pursuits, with a high probability of a chance encounter with a predator, would be viewed as having taken a calculated risk and should accept the consequences of injury.
Despite the latter not warranting a retaliatory response, all too often officials will act against the predator. …. Scientists and more informed members of the public strongly oppose attempts to simply kill members of the species in an act of a retribution.
Similarly, provoked attacks by wildlife on people behaving inappropriately, or when wild animals that have been deliberately habituated for tourism purposes injure people, almost always results in the animal being euthanised. It is for this reason that habituating wild animals should never supported.
University of London professor Simon Pooley, member of the International Union for Conservation of Nature task force on Human-Wildlife Conflict and its crocodile group
Lions, elephants, crocodilians, wolves and bears feature high on the agenda but there is regional variation in focus, for example jaguars are important in Latin America, snakes and leopards in parts of Africa and India, and so on.
Some survivors certainly suffer trauma, but it is mostly ignored. I have interviewed survivors in SA and eSwatini as well as Gujarat in India. Some victims develop a fear of going near water, and a few have what they refer to as 'moments of fear', what we would call panic attacks 'out of the blue'.
For the victims, there are a myriad of social consequences. It can be physical disability or disfigurement, and inability to work, depending on how bad the attack was. A girl in Eswatini and her parents had to make a difficult choice to either fund continued physiotherapy for her wrist and hand, or continue paying school fees, and she dropped out of school, in her penultimate year. So many of these kinds of stories are never told.
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