‘A leopard can’t change his spots?’ The iiom may also become extinct as the animal in it faces the danger of, in the coming decades. If we see the figures, the Maharashtra state alone has lost at least 78 leopards since 2010. Leopards are perhaps the most endangered species. The latest leopard deaths were reported from Sawli, Durgapur, Korambi Bhuj and Ashtabuja in Chandrapur district, Dhundi near Pusad in Yavatmal and two near Nashik.
On December 18, 2010, a leopard attacked three farmers in a village near Gurgaon, Haryana. Panicky villagers hammered it with iron rods and lathis. On January 9, 2011, in Karad, Maharashtra, a leopard was spotted atop a house. When a crowd of people gathered, the leopard hid into an empty building. Instead of trapping it inside, the mob stoned it. The angered cat charged out and injured six people. The leopard was shot by a police official despite the known fact that leopards are among the animals in danger of extinction.
A few days later, on January 13, 2011, a leopard was spotted in a forest plantation, about 5 km from Bhubaneshwar. Before the forest officials could arrive, a mob beat it to death, reportedly instigated by a local television reporter who wanted dramatic visuals. A number of leopards accused of attacking people in Haryana, Maharashtra and Orissa, have been killed by hysteric mobs in recent times.
Experts say leopards, which has been listed under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act (WPA) 1972, and which are among the animals in danger of extinction are dying at an alarming rate. In 2009, 48 leopards died in Maharashtra alone while in 2010-11, the number has risen to 76.
Leopards Facts – Information on Leopards
Shy creatures
We have all heard the above gruesome tails of leopards attacking people or stealing their live-stock, and many of us live in dread of these beautiful animals, without ever realizing that they are actually rather shy creatures. This is one of the leopards’ facts which no one knows about.
Leopard is the smallest of the four ‘big cats’ in the genus Panthera, the other three being the tiger, lion and jaguar. Its range of distribution has decreased radically because of hunting and loss of habitat. Because of its declining range and population, it is listed as a ‘Near Threatened’ species by the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature). Leopard is a shy animal. “Just because it has big teeth and long whiskers and is ferocious to look at doesn’t make it dangerous. It is more scared than the humans when it is caged.
“There are currently about 14 thousand leopards left in India and they are among the most endangered species of animals. The number may vanish soon if human attacks keep on increasing and secondly, if leopard poaching continues for the Chinese market,” said Vidya Athreya, a leading wildlife biologist of the country who has been actively working for leopard preservation since two decades. “Tiger bones are considered as an aphrodisiac and since tiger has become rare, leopard is poached in its place for its bones and sent to the Chinese market. Government has made lots of laws against poaching but I am doubtful about the extent of its implementation and effectiveness,” Athreya said.
“The problem is that these animals (leopards), fortunately or unfortunately, are very adaptable and they can even hide behind a patch of grass. Everybody thinks that wildlife should only live in the forests. But nobody seems to have told this to the wildlife! Wildlife does not see the boundaries we humans create. Leopards can’t tell where the forest ends and where the village or city starts,” she says.
The first reaction when a leopard is seen in an inhabited area is to catch it and put it in the jungle. The animal goes through the stress and a stressed animal is left in completely new surroundings. “The human behaviour also changes in stress; after all it is only an animal. How do we expect a stressed animal to react!” Vidya says.
Homing tendency
Another fact of leopards is that they have a very strong homing tendency and they instinctively try to return to the area that they had been moved from. Many of the times the relocated animal tends to travel all the distance back to its original habitat.
A leopard caught 120 km away and released inside the Nagarhole National Park in Karnataka in 1990 had immediately moved out of the park. Another leopard captured in Gujarat and translocated 30 km away was fitted with a radio collar. It was found to immediately return to its earlier territory. A Yawal leopard had moved nearly 90 km in the direction of Junnar from the site of her release inside the Yawal Wildlife Sanctuary before she was captured the second time.
“We did not know that relocation increases the problem instead of diminishing it and a majority of man-leopard conflict cases may have been culminated as a result of relocation. The trapped animal is left here and there and then the vicious cycle starts. Many a time small cubs are separated and relocated even before they learn to hunt. When such a hungry cub sees a child playing, it finds him as an easy prey and attacks,” Vidya said.
According to the recently issued guidelines of Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) it has been confirmed that relocation is not a solution to the man-leopard conflict and leopards are going through crisis of adaptation.
“99% of times leopards are not harming anybody. But no-one mentions that, even once because of relocation or other reasons if they attack, then everybody says leopards are dangerous,” she added. Leopards by nature live in human dominated landscape. “In the 1883 Nasik gazetteer it is mentioned that leopards come to the villages to catch dogs. Even in the ancient time of Shivaji, leopards used to come to the villages in the night,” she added.
The foremost learning is that it is not the absence of prey inside the forests, but the abundance of prey in the towns that encourages leopards to live alongside humans.
Even hyenas and foxes and wolves live close to human settlement and come to the villages at night time. Hyenas resemble dogs so much that it is difficult to differentiate at night time. But poor leopards, because of their spots easily stand out.
Garbage problems
Leopards like to eat dogs and they come to the villages in search of dogs as their prey. With the growing population, the filth and garbage heaps in the villages are just growing bigger which attracts stray dogs. And if we provide them abundant prey – like poorly protected domestic animals – there is bound to be conflict. “It is futile to manage leopards without first cleaning up the garbage and thereby controlling the numbers of stray dogs and pigs who live off the garbage. So the only solution to reduce this man-leopard conflict is to secure the livestock by caging them at night or building cowsheds,” Vidya says.
Vidya Athreya who has been working on leopards since two decades now says, “I was living in Junnar, in Pune district from 2001-03 when 50 people were attacked by leopards. It happened when leopards that had not hurt anyone were preemptively captured and relocated. Because I was living there I could not remain untouched by it. Nobody was doing anything about it, and that’s when I decided to take it up.”
There happen to be no specific leopard reserves in India. Reserves are mostly for tigers and tigers kill leopards. So leopards stay on the fringes of jungles or in the hilly areas,” says Athreya who has been a researcher from the Wildlife Institute of India in 1995.
She has started projectwaghoba for leopard preservation in the year 2007. Work has been done mainly in Maharashtra. “You need lot of money to do pure ecological work on such a species,” Vidya said. The project is basically to ensure that loss of any sort to the leopards is minimized. Their work involves understanding the behavior of the animals by monitoring them, training people living close to leopard habitats on how to prevent and manage any confrontation. “The research on leopards will be finishing in December this year. We have made a movie in the rural language to make the villagers understand how to maintain cleanliness. Moreover, a book has been written by a farmer which tries to talk about complex relationship between humans and large wild cats,” she added. The information on leopards will be disseminated in the western India in the coming years.
The long term solution is to decrease the high density of interface between the villagers and leopards. And for that we need proper garbage management in order to reduce the filth. “It’s not possible in India to reduce the garbage overnight,” Vidya says. If villages are clean then a less number of leopards will frequent human inhabited area.
“But amongst all this the positive thing is that leopard breeding rate is high. And India is the only country which is so tolerant to wildlife,” Vidya says. Here, the population density is 340 people per sq km. Despite such heavy population density, we have the highest number of wildlife available. We can haope that people will become aware of need to save leopards, and one way to do so is to spread information on leopards. By disseminating leopards’ facts we can save this most endangered species. The first thing we need to spread is leopards are animals in danger of extinction and they should be protected on all possible cost.
