If you thought dragons ate people only in fairy tales, you haven’t heard of the Komodo dragons of Indonesia. They may not breathe fire, but they are as dangerous and cause as much terror as their fantasy counterparts.
The fierce lizard, which lives on a few remote islands, can reach 10 feet long and live 50 years. It generally feeds on buffalo and deer. But they now have developed a taste for humans.
The 4,000 people who populate four fishing villages in the islands have a right to be fearful, as they just barely outnumber the dragons in Komodo National Park, their main habitat.
Up until the past few years, the dragons and humans lived together in a precarious balance. The villagers, viewing the dragons as a reincarnation of their ancestors, treated them like family, leaving deer parts for the dragons after a hunt and often tying goats to a post as a sacrifice. Island taboos strictly prohibited hurting them, which probably accounts for the fact the dragons have survived in the Komodo area despite becoming extinct everywhere else.
This system worked well, say the villagers, until the modern world intervened. In 1995, the Nature Conservancy, an environmental protection group, began to manage the park. This connection, along with a local business’ concession in the park, generated several million dollars to aid in the conservation effort.
It also upset the traditional system that had been in place for centuries. Park officials banned deer hunting, saying it would remove the dragons’ food source. "If we let the locals hunt again,” a Park official, “the dragons will be gone. If we are not strict in enforcing the ban, poachers will decimate the deer stock and everything here will be destroyed."
They also outlawed the villagers’ dogs, calling them an alien species in the Park, and banned goat sacrifices. Now there are no dogs to scare the dragons away.
So, the dragons, which mostly stayed in their small areas, began spreading out in a search for food. They enter the villages, snapping up chickens and goats – and sometimes humans. Last year, as he crouched in the grass outside his home, a 9-year-old boy was ambushed and eaten by a dragon in broad daylight while his frantic relatives looked on helplessly.
Others have had close calls with the dragons.
The villagers are reluctant to blame the revered dragons for their behavior. "I don’t blame the dragons for my boy’s death,” said the father of the boy who was killed. “I blame those who forbade us from following custom and feeding them. If it weren’t for them, my boy would still be alive."
Today the dragons are angry with us, and see us as enemies," said another villager. The reason, he believes, is that environmentalists have destroyed Komodo’s age-old symbiosis between dragon and man.
Nature Conservancy officials deny there is any connection between the ban on feeding the dragons and the boy’s death and other dragon attacks, adding that the boy should not have crouched in an area where he could become prey to a marauding dragon.
So far, the Nature Conservancy is baffled about how to solve the problem. They say it is more difficult for them to coexist in harmony now because both populations have grown so much. “With local villages pushing deeper inland and attracting new settlers from elsewhere in Indonesia, conflict may be inevitable — and even a fence won’t be able to prevent dragon infiltrations,” an official said.
The best they can say in response to the problem: "The Komodo effort is a work in progress."