Leopard in attack mode | Vidhuraj M.T.
There is never a dull day in Kannur, say the people of this north Kerala town. Even so, March 5 turned out to be more eventful than anyone had imagined.
Around 3pm on that Sunday someone spotted a leopard in a busy area near the Thayatheru lower primary school. As people screamed in panic and excitement the leopard ran through the bylanes of residential areas, mauled people who happened to be in its way and hid in a thicket near a railway overbridge. One of its victims, K.K. Nabith, 44, was seriously injured.
As the news spread, hundreds crowded the place. Many of them feared that the roar of any passing train would frighten the leopard into charging wildly out of the thicket and attacking more people. Among them was 23-year-old Navaneet Krishnan, a volunteer for Malabar Awareness and Rescue Centre for wildlife. Navaneet and his friends Mufeed and Sandeep—they help the forest department rescue wild animals spotted in inhabited places—approached the spot cautiously. They surveyed the thicket from a distance but could not see the animal. Just as their back was turned, the leopard charged and mauled Mufeed.
“I was barely two metres from the leopard and have survived to tell the tale,” said Navaneet. “It is unreal. As a volunteer I have dealt with less dangerous animals but this is my first experience with a leopard. I think it is an experience for life.”
Leopard in town came as a surprise to forest officers. “When information reached us that a leopard had entered Kannur town, at first we didn’t believe it because there is no forest within 40km of Kannur,” said Shrawan Kumar Verma, chief conservator of forests. “But when the caller said a person was injured, the Rapid Response Team rushed to the spot.”
The police and forest officers struggled to disperse the crowd, which was trying to get a glimpse of the animal and take photographs and even selfies. “But other than this, the behaviour of the crowd was exemplary,” said Verma. Within a few hours Dr Arun Zachariah, forest veterinary officer, Wayanad Wildlife Sanctuary, arrived with a tranquilliser gun. “I was called in around 5pm and started the operation about three hours later,” he said. By then, the residents got some fishermen to throw nylon fishing nets on the thicket. When the team led by Zachariah was ready, the net was raised a little and they drove a jeep into the thicket. The area had been lit up by the fire force and, using search lights, the tranquilliser team spotted the leopard and fired the dart. As it fell, the vet examined it—he declared that it was a male, about six or seven years old, healthy and without external injuries.
But how could the leopard reach the heart of the town? One good guess is that it came on a truck from Karnataka, as a stowaway. Zachariah said instances of leopards reaching cities were not unheard of. “Leopards are a highly versatile species. It is an edge [edge of the forest] species unlike the tiger, which is a core [deep forest] species. Leopards move with river ecosystems and this brings them close to man and eventually they are spotted,” he said. Such visitations, he said, would happen again.
District forest officer Sunil Pamidi told THE WEEK that the leopard was taken to the Neyyar Wildlife Sanctuary in Thiruvananthapuram. It had a vet for company during the journey.
