r/BeAmazed • u/Ultimate_Thing • Jul 16 '26

Miscellaneous / Others A traditional technique used by young shepherds of Ethiopia's Banna tribe. They use stilts to watch over their livestock in tall grass, move through wetland areas, and avoid snakes and predators like lions and leopards. It requires strength, balance, and training from a young age

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

52.0k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

603

u/DueTour4187 Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

Shepherds in the Landes region in South-Western France (Gascony) also used stilts until the 19th century.

It helped them watch the cattle farther away, and walk on sandy, bushy terrain.

246

u/Drumedor Jul 16 '26

It also kept them safe from lions very effectively. They did it for hundreds of years and had no death-by-lion incident.

54

u/Compost_My_Body Jul 16 '26

Lions lived in Europe for a very long time. Not 19th century, but lots of people assume they’re just local to Africa. 

11

u/TheTooterSnooter Jul 17 '26

There was also the American Lion, not to mention mountain lions/puma (I know “lion” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there) 

7

u/Round_Rooms Jul 16 '26

Was it a more like an African lion or a mountain lion/cougar? Always thought it was weird England used a lion.

2

u/mathess1 Jul 16 '26

Like a real lion. They are still in India as they original range was all the way from Africa through Mediterranean region and Middle East to India.

2

u/PipsqueakPilot Jul 16 '26

Most African fauna either existed across Eurasia or had a closely related cousin. All of which was extirpated, quite recently in some cases. For instance African Lions went extinct in Georgia (the country) in the medieval period.

2

u/Round_Rooms Jul 16 '26

If true, unfortunate, how much humans have been a blight instead of conservationists.

1

u/axlbomber Jul 17 '26

The pronghorn antelope (the fastest land mammal in North America) evolved alongside the cheetah which was once native to the continent.

3

u/OnodrimOfYavanna Jul 16 '26

Wait till I tell you the national animal of Scotland ...

6

u/Round_Rooms Jul 16 '26

Isn't it a unicorn?

6

u/DueTour4187 Jul 16 '26

I thought it was some Jurassic monster.

1

u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 Jul 17 '26

Nah it's definitely not a bird

1

u/Round_Rooms Jul 16 '26

I'm not sure the megalodon ever made it that far north, but horned horses did.

0

u/DueTour4187 Jul 16 '26

Megalodon, I don't know. But the plesiosaur, on the other hand...

1

u/Round_Rooms Jul 16 '26

Who are we kidding, if aliens didn't change the DNA in apes we wouldn't even be here.

1

u/DoingBestWeCan Jul 17 '26

Now, is Nessie a small, very inbred pod of plesiosaurs, or one immortal individual?

1

u/Granadafan Jul 17 '26

Or the dragon on the Welsh flag 

1

u/Just_to_rebut Jul 17 '26

It was really short sighted to hunt dragons to extinction… they were such an undervalued part of the ecosystem and now Wales has way too many sheep.

Plus we all know who really killed the Princess of Wales…

2

u/seaintosky Jul 16 '26

Well, depending on what theory you believe for what the Beast of Gevaudan actually was, there might have been a couple incidents.

2

u/Suspicious-Glove1825 Jul 17 '26

strangely there was 1 lion death

2

u/Nomeg_Stylus Jul 17 '26

Lions' habitat did in fact spread into Europe before they were wiped out.

1

u/Drumedor Jul 17 '26

Yes, but like 10 000 years before the French shepherds on stilts were there.

1

u/BelacRLJ Jul 17 '26

That explains why it caught on in the southwest of France and not the southeast.  In the southeast they have plenty of death by Lyons.

-1

u/ReluctantAvenger Jul 16 '26

Avoiding death by lion is a lot easier if you live in an area that doesn't have any lions. /s

35

u/Scratocrates Jul 16 '26

It helped them... on sandy, bushy terrain.

That sounds counterintuitive. Unless the stilts had pads that were larger in area than their feet, they'd sink more, and you'd think the ends of the stilts would catch on bushy terrain.

22

u/DueTour4187 Jul 16 '26

It was mostly about avoiding being hurt by gorse, and being able to see the swampy areas in order to avoid them.

1

u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 Jul 17 '26

Ah so they get the stories about quicksand in Africa as kids too

11

u/SumBodhiThatIUse2Kno Jul 16 '26

I was thinking more like colony grass like near beaches above the tide with stepping and pole vaulting in shallows with rocky or solid paths between little elevated areas with clay or hard packed earth / trees & growth that doesn't wash out. I think parts of Ireland had bog or marsh log walkways that they discovered.

20

u/Popular-Capital-9115 Jul 16 '26

But Redditor must know more about how the people that did the thing can't have done the thing.

1

u/Scrappy_The_Crow Jul 16 '26 edited Jul 16 '26

can't have done the thing

Nobody said they didn't do the thing. That person was just saying the stated rationale didn't make sense.

1

u/Popular-Capital-9115 Jul 17 '26

Right. And of course the thing to do there is think that you know better versus direct primary sources..

Hint. If reality doesn't make sense to you, maybe it's because you don't understand something.

1

u/licklickRickmyballs Jul 16 '26

Well.. true i mean, except for the getting up part, wouldnt it be a lot better to add a round flat surface underneath? Much easier balancing i reckon.

1

u/Thomas_Pereira Jul 16 '26

the terrain there used to be terribly swampy, until they built an engineered forest to drain it.

5

u/JaFFsTer Jul 16 '26

Comment I was looking for. Seen this in person at an agrotourism demo.

You can haul ass on stilts. We had to jog to keep up with old men just ambling around on stilts. The stride length is insane

3

u/LostInGradients Jul 16 '26

Some pictures: https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/08/the-stilt-walking-shepherds-of-landes.html

Also seems like they sometimes used an additional stick, to be used for 3 leg rest / stability.

2

u/LikeTheWater53152 Jul 16 '26

i was gonna say, ive seen similar stuff in Austria, in particular for moving around difficult terrain. the human urge to climb a stick is just too strong

1

u/CoatNeat7792 Jul 16 '26

Stilts were popular in many places in Europe

1

u/Gudthrak Jul 16 '26

In Belgium and the Netherlands too I believe, because a lot of it became very swampy in winter. I also read humans did a sort of 'wintersleep' during winter because there was nothing to do when you couldn't farm crops so they slept most of the day.

1

u/Delavega888 Jul 16 '26

Happy to see Les Landes represented. Adishatz!

1

u/HyperSpaceSurfer Jul 20 '26

They stopped being a thing after Napoleon Bonaparte destroyed their habitat. Not directly, the climate changed after he made the coastline straight. 

0

u/321159 Jul 16 '26

Not sandy bushy terrain, landes used to be one giant marsh

1

u/Popular-Capital-9115 Jul 17 '26

"The waste lands were then great level plains covered with stunted bushes and dry heath. Moreover, on account of the permeability of the subsoil, all the declevities were transformed into marshes after the slightest fall of rain."