CEBU, Philippines - In Discovery Channel’s three-part series WORLD’S DEADLIEST TOWNS, animal trainer and behavior expert Dave Salmoni takes viewers to three deadly spots in the world where animals and people are locked in extreme mortal combat.
Premieres every Tuesday at 9:00 pm beginning October 11, with encores every Wednesday at midnight 12:00 am, 8:00 am and 2:00 pm.
The series shares intense, real-life scenarios where people are in perpetual fear for their lives. Led by Salmoni, WORLD’S DEADLIEST TOWNS transports viewers to remote Indian and African villages, where rogue elephants, killer hippos and man-eating tigers have waged full-on wars – pillaging people’s land, eating their food and, in some cases, putting man on the menu.
Elephants can be gentle giants but in West Bengal, India, human encroachment has driven them to be nothing like their reputation. Elephants are by nature herbivores, but something’s going on in this Indian village that’s causing them to trample, gore, tear people from limb to limb and even consume human flesh. In one of the most hostile wildlife war zones on earth, Salmoni sets out to uncover why the world’s largest land mammals have become so dangerous.
Then Salmoni travels to Zambia’s Zambezi River where a hippo kills an entire family of nine, and the villagers are convinced voodoo caused it. Digging deep into a world of African witchcraft and sorcery, Salmoni takes part in a ritualistic hippo exorcism that makes him rethink everything he thinks he knows about animal attacks.
In India’s Sunderbans, Royal Bengal tigers kill people on a daily basis and are putting a rural Indian community at the front line of conflict between man and man-eater. Salmoni goes on a mission to find out why fatal attacks are on the rise. Putting himself at extreme risk, he uncovers one recent case that reveals a shocking development in the tigers’ deadly strategy, helping explain why the crisis is worsening and what might be done to resolve it.
"WORLD'S DEADLIEST TOWNS shows the remote corners of the world where people must live under the constant threat of predatory and threatening animal presence," says Salmoni. "The people I visited in Bengal, the Sunderbans and Zambia all have that in common - the persistent, mortal fear that they may not be alive tomorrow - that an elephant, a tiger or a hippo will be the death of them or someone they love."