Leopards Of India

    Leopard in India

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Wildlife officials found this leopard caught in a snare trap near northern India’s Corbett National Park. Clashes between people and wildlife are hard to prevent in a country where 703 protected areas share the land with 1.3 billion people.

Now the tragedy was being reduced to ritual. The women sat silently on the floor at the far end of the porch. Local officials, old men in white Gandhi caps, sat in mid-porch, and at the other end of the porch, the father sat on the spot where his son had been taken, with male family and friends huddled around him. The forest official introduced himself (“I am also from a rural area; I am not somebody coming in from above”) and explained that he did not mean the compensation payment, about $12,300, as a substitute for their loss but as an acknowledgment from the government, which is responsible for the leopards. One of the local officials came to inspect the check, and they engaged in a cordial dance, with each of them saying the other should present it.

The family made a few small requests, and the forest official said he would try to help, and then it was over. Four miles down the road there was another house to visit with much the same story. When such leopard attacks occur, they tend to come in terrifying waves. Sai Mandlik’s death was the third attack in the Junnar area in just over two weeks, and the second fatality.

It’s a puzzle: Much of the time, even in Mumbai, leopards and humans coexist peacefully. So why do sudden violent outbreaks occur in an area such as Junnar? The morning after the presentation at the Mandlik house Vidya Athreya, a biologist with the Wildlife Conservation Society, sat beside a sugarcane field in the nearby town of Akole. On her laptop computer a map of the community was lit up in great turquoise splotches representing all the places she found leopards during her five-year study here, using camera traps and radio collars. In short, she found them everywhere, 11 adults roaming by night in and around Akole, an area with no forests and no deer or other big, natural prey and where 20,000 people move around by day.

The first question was, Why so many leopards? As elsewhere in India, it begins with reliance on open trash and meat market dumps, which support a thriving community of stray dogs, feral pigs, and other small animals. Federal law and an influential animal-rights movement prevent removal of street dogs. So the dogs and other domestic animals in turn support a thriving community of leopards. (They made up 87 percent of the leopards’ diet in Athreya’s study.)

Irrigation schemes introduced since the 1980s also help attract leopards. Among other crops, sugarcane is now common in formerly dry areas such as Akole and the Junnar region, and this tall, thick grass provides a perfect hiding place for leopards—close to villages, garbage heaps, and dogs. It is an ecosystem.

And yet leopards have become our shadows, our quasi-companion animals. They have no choice. The two great leopard population centers, sub-Saharan Africa and the subcontinent of India, are among the most populous regions in the world. Human expansion has already cost leopards an estimated 66 percent of their range in Africa and 85 percent in Eurasia, with most of the loss occurring over the past five decades. In many areas the only place left to survive is side by side with humans.

Unlike most other big cats, leopards can adapt, up to a point. They can prey, for example, on anything from dung beetles and porcupines to a 2,000-pound eland. They can make a home at 110 degrees Fahrenheit in the Kalahari Desert or at minus 13 degrees in Russia. They can thrive in sea-level mangrove swamps on the coast of India or at 17,000 feet in the Himalaya. That adaptability, combined with a genius for hiding in plain sight, means leopards are entirely capable of living among humans, as they do in Mumbai. The question is whether humans can learn to live with leopards.

We have a long and complicated relationship, and like much else, it began in Africa. Leopards are a young species: They emerged in their modern form as recently as 500,000 years ago. Like us, they spread out to populate a large chunk of the globe, from the southern tip of Africa to the Russian Far East, as well as west into Senegal and southeast to Indonesia. They may have shadowed early humans, to take advantage of our ability to drive off lions and other competitors or, later, to pick off our livestock. We may have shadowed them to scavenge on their kills. (They are more vulnerable than other carnivores to scavenging because of their practice of stashing a kill under a bush or up a tree, then wandering off a short distance to rest, returning later to eat.)

By their predatory behavior, leopards imprinted themselves on the genomes of our fellow primates: Even monkeys that have never seen a leopard nonetheless display an instantaneous and heightened attentiveness to that spotted yellow coat. And so do we, with a curious mix of alarm and attraction. Our ambivalence is evident in the jarring mix of headlines that turn up in any news search for the word “leopard.” There’s often something warm (“Newborn Leopard Cubs Make History, Melt Your Heart”), something violent (“Another Leopard Attack in Junnar”), and something fashionably titillating (“Gisele Bündchen Rocks Leopard-Print Bikini in Costa Rica”). Often the headlines also speak of anger and vengeance.

One day in South Africa’s Limpopo Province I visited a cattle rancher, a big, friendly man in his 60s, dressed Boy Scout style in a short-sleeved shirt, green shorts, and green socks, rolled down an inch or two from the knees. He had a King James Bible open on his desk, heavily highlighted, and the skull of a leopard displayed on an end table. The skull had a small, precise bullet hole in it.

The cats prefer medium-size prey like antelope and monkeys but can take animals many times their size.

“We are very fond of these animals,” he began. “It’s a beautiful animal! But it’s difficult to be on the same land with them. We have lots of natural prey for them—warthogs, baboons, wild pigs, natural prey.” And yet the leopards insisted on taking his calves.

He opened the studbook in which he registers births and deaths of his Brahman cattle, a prized breed, and began to recite killings—one every six weeks or so over the previous 18 months. His farm workers learn of a death on morning rounds, when a cow urgently informs them of her loss, and of her need for milking. Later she leads them “straight to where the calf is, half eaten or up a tree.” The rancher estimated his loss for each calf at more than $2,000. “We have very experienced trackers, and they’ll say if the leopard is a young female or an older male. Usually the leopard will come back for two days.”

The use of trackers—plus that skull on the end table—suggested someone waiting with a rifle to kill the attacker. But the rancher said only, “You live with them, and you keep quiet about them, because if you do anything about them, you are liable to be arrested and put in jail.” (South African law permits both jail time and a fine, but sentences are almost always lenient.) Other people kill “hundreds of them every year,” he said. “They’re shot, stuck in a hole, you put petrol on it, put a match in, and that’s it.”

Some leopard pelts also end up being sold into a trade that is driven to a surprising extent by the worship of God.