The next time you see a leopard in your town...

If you took the city of Tokyo and turned it upside down and shook it you would be amazed at the animals that fall out: badgers, wolves, boa constrictors, crocodiles, ostriches, baboons, capybaras, wild boars, leopards, manatees, ruminants, in untold numbers. There is no doubt in my mind that feral giraffes and feral hippos have been living in Tokyo for generations without seeing a soul." 
- Yann Martel, Life of Pi 

As the horrendous impact of the earthquake that hit Japan last month has shown, "shaking" a city is none too far-fetched an image. But when Martel wrote these lines, his metaphor was perhaps figurative. Either way, there are incidents time and again where you run into leopards, jackals and foxes in open yards, farmhouses and city outskirts. And this troubling reality is reinforced further by the leopard that ventured into the Mysore campus of Infosys in February. 


We are slowly being enlightened to the reality that the description of wild animal doesn't necessarily suit animals that are confined to forests. Leopards can survive in suburbs and cities by hiding in abandoned buildings and preying on stray dogs. This January, fellow-Ogre Bijoy and friend Rohit saw a leopard that had been run over by a speeding vehicle at dawn on the NICE road on the outskirts of Bangalore city. While the leopards of Mumbai have made headlines repeatedly, Mysore has seen several leopard-man conflicts in recent years. The worst was perhaps in 2008 when, in the presence of police and forest officials, an assembled mob surrounded a leopard that had strayed into the city and beat it to death. Media spread rumours that it was a man-eater, as it had desperately lunged at some of its tormentors with the fury typical of a cornered wild animal. 


The morning of March 8 saw forest officials, police and CISF at the Infosys campus in Mysore after a leopard had been spotted at night in one of the buildings under construction. This time the leopard was tranquilized and subsequently released 90 km away in Nagarahole National Park. Some amateur photographers got too close to the cornered leopard, completely disregarding security warnings. As these heroes attempted to photograph the leopard from close quarters, the cat charged them. On the basis of this incident, media reports announced shriekingly that the leopard had "mauled" the photographer. Mercifully, being amid a more "aware" group of humans, the leopard was not immediately branded a man-eater and bludgeoned to death. 


Leopards are all around, especially in a city like Mysore. Chamundi Hills, a well-known leopard habitat, is being encroached by the city from all directions. Naturally, running short of food, opportunistic leopards will take to the suburbs for easy pickings in stray dogs and livestock. Rarely do we get instances where they attack humans, and when they do, it is either when they are cornered or trying to protect their young. 


The Ministry of Environment and Forests has come up with very elaborate guidelines on how to deal with human-leopard conflict. When there has been no deliberate attack, and no straying into thickly populated area, the manual says it is best to leave the leopard alone, the reason being that the animals may make every effort to keep away from people. But if the leopard ends up in a populated area, there is a chance that human presence can agitate them into acts of desperation. In the rare event of it being a child-lifter or in case of deliberate attacks on humans, the officials are permitted to euthanise the animal in a humane way. 


Apart from this, several steps may be taken to minimize public fury due to such conflicts. The manual provides guidance to build leopard-proof cattle sheds, educate villagers who are compensated for any livestock taken by the animals, and to leave the livestock kill alone to prevent further attacks. Also, providing proper sanitation and waste disposal in villages near forests is important to check pig and stray dog activity as these animals attract leopards. In some villages in the Himalayas, we have noticed dogs with spiked metal collars to deter leopards (the cats are known to kill their prey with a fatal bite to the throat, severing the jugular vein).

A Bhotia dog in Chopta, Uttarakhand is fitted with a spiked metal collar to deter predation by leopards

Man-animal conflicts are a reality we have to live with given the increasing rate of habitat fragmentation. Sighting a leopard near human habitation does not warrant pressing the panic button -- it might be a passerby on the lookout for stray dogs. Alert the local wildlife warden rather than raise a public alarm. 


Download this informative manual [PDF/ ZIP] on human-leopard conflicts. You never know when you may need it.

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Text by Sandeep Somasekharan with additional inputs from Bijoy Venugopal
Photographs: Leopard image by Philip MacKenzie/ Stock.xchng; Other images by Bijoy Venugopal


Thanks to Kalyan Varma for the conversations that inspired this post and to Vidya Athreya whom we have never met but whose important work at Project Waghoba we have followed from a distance. The Green Ogre had earlier written about Kalyan's stirring photo-essay on the capture of a leopard in Valparai. 


Also read Arun Menon's account of a suspected leopard presence in Bilikal Rangaswamy Betta.

Paper and plastic - kicking the habit

Over at Life Less Plastic, Jeanne Haegele writes: And I still buy milk (in a glass container) and meat (wrapped in paper at the deli), and use my own cloth produce and grocery bags. In my three-decade-plus lifetime I have seen my parents do the same. Why, only about 15 years ago I have bought milk in a steel container. And I have shopped veggies in a little cloth bag emblazoned with a kitschy reproduction of a Mughal painting. As for meat and chicken and fish, we got them wrapped in sheets of newspaper - it was morbidly comic to see the 'killed' and 'dead' so ubiquitous in our headlines clinging to the gills of mackerel or slapped to mutton ribs. Somewhere along the way, plastic took over. First, as a fad. Then, as an excuse for convenience. Now, it has become a scourge. Haegele's article in the Dallas Morning Post was honest in that it dissected the quandary that some of our more discerning shoppers face every day - to plastic or not to plastic. Offered no choice by retailers, most go with the first option (no choice = no option, innit?). Ergo, along with the veggies and cartons and the ephemeral guilt come strips of shrink and bubble wrap, and plastic bags of varying micron thickness. Since we don't eat them, where do they go? Into the trash can. And then? Does anyone care? It's not about plastic alone. At Infosys, where I worked until August, green consciousness is afoot among the employees. How deep this runs is debatable but even a move from ecological nihilism to environmental lip-service is undoubtedly a start and deserves a round of applause, however feeble. At Infosys, plastic bags are being phased out - the bookshop and supermarket at the Bangalore campus have been wrapping their ware in brown paper bags for more than a year. Noble. But what of paper itself? An interesting opinion piece by Stanley Fish ran counter to Haegele's. Of course, the Fish eye-view comes across as anti-environmentalist posturing of shaky credibility - he takes on the greens but it's clear soon enough that he is a renegade green himself. What stayed with me was the reference to toilet paper and that oh-so-familiar name among all ye who paper thy behinds. Kimberley-Clark. If you live in a Turd World Country (like moi) and have trouble placing that name, allow me to help. Think of the last time you used a public loo at a hip software company or at any of our new temples of modern India - the newfangled international airports, eco-sensitive hotels, liver-protecting pubs, etc. The brand name that you smeared your poo with was Kimberley-Clark. Toilet paper, or just paper in the form of napkins and face tissue, has become an addiction with us children of the night-soil. And it is the sole reason why I choose to patronise the pain-in-the-butt salesman touting cloth handkerchiefs at Shivaji Nagar bus stand over the waif at traffic signals selling boxes of paper napkins for your car. But what's galling is the sight of people using whole wads of paper to wipe their faces - it leads me to ponder the unsanitary question: How many reams of Kimberley-Clark does it takes to finish up after they take a dump? Do they know that they are wiping their arses with strips of hoary boreal forest? And just one generation ago, these very people barely had water to use after a trip to the john (which was more likely than not of the clean and hygienic Indian-style sit-down-and-go variety). You didn't know?! There's evidence here and here and here. Back to plastic. The only option we are left with, if not for Alka Zadgaonkar's ingenious idea, is to make it edible. As for paper, why wipe when you can wash? It's time the rest of the world tore a leaf out of the toilet roll of the Turd World.