a leaf warbler's gleanings

Well and truly in the lurch, some of these leopards, if the footage in this film is anything to go by - some very disturbing stuff in there, so be warned. (I might warn you about the narration also, which is more annoying than disturbing!)

As for the leopards, I'm not sure what to make of the numbers cited: are leopards really being killed by the tens to hundreds annually across India? All due to their "incursions" into human habitation - or vice versa, really - given dwindling deer and other prey populations and the ease of finding dogs and even humans. On the one hand, one feels optimistic if that many leopards are indeed being killed annually, by professional hunters or frenzied mobs, yet the problem persists. The overall population may yet be healthy if it can absorb such mortality at human hands and continue to thrive amid human enterprise. On the other hand, we might be seeing a real ecological trap (if not sink) in the villages that attract these leopards, and a bigger crisis in their wild habitats in terms of their natural prey - so the number killed by people may be really decimating the population. I'm not sure if there is a reliable estimate of leopard populations across India - but leopards have proven themselves to be highly adaptable to human dominated landscapes, thriving even within the municipal limits of the megalopolis of Mumbai. The real question is whether we can adapt our own actions to make sure we don't push this lovely cat over the brink and send it spiralling towards extinction even as we try to save human lives.

And what of the traditional Indian culture, steeped in Hindu philosophy, that is supposed to make us much more tolerant of wildlife than in other parts of the world? Some of the footage above certainly runs counter to notions of tolerance - but could it be more an indication of people's desperation and frustration at losing so many humans (how reliable are those numbers cited here) to these cats? In the context of those casualty numbers, the overall response seems actually rather restrained, especially when compared with the number of mountain lions "taken" in the American west even when they harm far fewer humans.

[Hat-tip: Waghoba Tipkya]