Survivor on the fringes of the forest
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“The leopard is intellectually smarter than the tiger.
Pound for pound its power and agility are unmatched, and it can exist like a destitute, yet live like a king.” - Billy Arjan Singh It is dark, but the black of the night is softened by the moon’s glow. I am walking in the forest, a rare forbidden treat, armed with nothing but a stick, and accompanied by a local guide. While this is not a protected forest, it is big cat country. I stumble, unfamiliar as I am with the uneven terrain, and blinded by the night. The mssovement disturbs a chital that crashes through the shrubs. We are yards away from our destination – a waterhole, and so intent am I on watching my step that I almost miss it, catching just a glimpse of molten gold that disappears into the night.
It is here, now. So close… I long to see it. Do I, though? A twig breaks behind us. It is the footfall of the leopard. We wait. And wait. I stop breathing. This moment that is frozen in time is broken by a frantic langur bark, and close on its heels, the sharp cry of a chital – the predator is on the prowl. The calls continue. The leopard moves away, but it is on the hunt… This doesn’t count as a leopard sighting – but even in the cat’s absence, I could feel the power of its presence, the stealth of one of nature’s most efficient predators. The cursed cat What hope is there for Panthera pardus? You could call it a cursed cat – persecuted for straying into human habitat and damned for its beauty. The leopard’s supple, dappled coat has draped the most fashionable shoulders – if one could pin down this trend to one woman, it would probably be the late first lady of the U.S., Jackie Kennedy Onassis. She made an instant fashion statement when she donned a leopard coat. Her choice in coats doomed the cat. In the 1960s, an estimated 2,50,000 leopards were killed worldwide and converted to coats, shoes, gloves and bags. Predictably, wild populations plummeted. Fortunately, the cat got a reprieve when the international conservation community imposed a ban on the commercial trade in leopard derivatives (early 1980s). The ban is still in place, but so are poachers and illegal traders. Even as we watch the tiger slip away, the leopard is locked with the striped predator in a macabre race to extinction – a victim of human-animal conflict and a prized target for poachers. The wildlife cell of the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) estimates that for every tiger skin seized, there are at least 10 leopard skins taken. Nothing demonstrates this better than the case of the Tibet seizure in October 2003 in which 31 tiger skins and 581 leopard skins, all sourced from India, were recovered. The leopard in India But it is not just the skin trade that is damning the leopard – there is demand for its bones as well. As tiger numbers drop, leopard bones are increasingly used as substitutes in Traditional Chinese Medicine. The claws are fashioned into pendants. In January 2000, 18,080 leopard claws were seized in Katni in Uttar Pradesh. Shockingly, in this age of ecological enlightenment, shikar is still a macho game, and the leopard, the ultimate prize. I once met a local shikari in Uttarakhand who makes a living by killing ‘small game’. He told me that it was a way of life in these parts. “In this region, people follow a simple rule: Have gun, will shoot.” Forest officers and conservationists confirmed that local shikaris were capable of organising shoots, adding that some unscrupulous resorts around the Corbett Tiger Reserve used organised shoots to lure clients away from more principled lodges. Small game – hare and jungle fowl – I was informed were the usual victims, though leopards were also on offer to select, high-paying customers. The modus operandi is deadly. Local trackers zero in on the animal leaving the hunters little to do other than pull a trigger. Then we have that other canard that is used to kill leopards – declaring them as maneaters. No sooner is a fatality reported, then a death warrant is issued – for the ‘maneater’ – and a rush of applications from local hunters ensue for the coveted license. This policy virtually breeds maneaters. Since 2001, 33 people are believed to have lost their lives in the hill state of Uttarakhand to leopards. Forest officials say that 25 leopards were killed as maneaters. In addition, not less than 50 are poached annually. On August 20, 2007, labourers from the Moubandha Tea Estate in Jorhat in Assam beat three leopard cubs to death without provocation. More such cases can be expected since forest loss leaves leopard mothers little choice but to drop their litters in and around tea bushes. A deadly future The leopard is a shy, solitary animal, a rare sight in the wild. Not being the top predator like a tiger or a lion, it lives on the fringes of the forest and survives on small game like barking deer, chital, langur and, in times of stress, even frogs, ground birds and hare. With each passing day, habitat destruction forces leopards into closer proximity to humans as hunger drives them towards goats, chicken, dogs – and, sometimes, humans. From the teeming metropolis of Mumbai, desolate Baria in Gujarat, sugarcane fields of Junnar, Maharashtra to the hills of Pauri-Garhwal in Uttarakhand, leopard and man are locked in deadly conflict. It hardly helps that public opinion goes against the leopard. Revenge killings are brutal and commonplace with animals being beaten to death, hacked into pieces and often burnt alive. One such incident – captured gorily on camera – of a leopard in a cage being burned to death in Pauri did win some sympathy for the cats, but not in the hearts of people living next to them. Another tragic case was that of a leopard beaten to death in Nasik. Stories emerging from Goa, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka offer no respite. At last count, something over 700 captures have taken place, with most animals damaging themselves instantly in poorly-designed cages. I have not been able to establish any systematic plan of State Forest Departments working with professional field biologists in any organised fashion. Most captured leopards either die quickly, or are condemned to life in a cage forever. What should be food for thought for petty politicians and short-sighted bureaucrats who think little of handing over forest lands for non-forest use is the fact that in dense and undisturbed forests like Bandipur and Gir – with high leopard densities – cases of humans being killed by leopards are almost unheard of. All such forests are sources of water for communities living far from them and these habitats help to sequester and store carbon – vital to our battle against climate change. This points the way to a solution to our man-animal problem – allow buffer areas and connecting corridors to regenerate so that they act as a bio-wall between humans and animals. Humans have a long history of hatred towards this prince of cats as can be judged by the pain evident in the words of the famous Jim Corbett who wrote in his classic, Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag: “Here as only an old leopard, the best hated and most feared animal in all India, whose only crime – not against the laws of nature but against the laws of man – was that he shed human blood, with no object of terrorising, but only in order he might live.” Source: Sanctuary Asia |
User comments
"Leopards in assam"Author:
roopa sharma
Time: 13.01.2008 13:42
Comment: Your article has reminded me of the plight of hungry leopards that have begun straying into shopping malls of guahati in search of food.SO much constuction there is eating away this beautiful animals' habitat that it is defenceless against.
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