8. Maasai Lion Fighting
via dailymotion.com
Although the practice of lion fighting by the Masaai people of Kenya and Tanzania is now defunct, previously the only way of becoming a man was to spear a lion. Then, the warrior class rotated every six to ten years, giving way to a new group of chief protectors of society. To determine who those would be, young men were circumcised (long after birth, unlike North-Americans and worldwide Jews) and then sent out, sometimes in groups and sometimes on their own, to hunt down and kill a lion. As anyone who has tried to get a cat into its crate without injury would know, that is a frightening task.
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