Indian Leopard (Panthera pardus fusca)

[Styx38]

Mumbai- The Metropolitan Home of Man-Eating Leopards


Fatalities

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

*This image is copyright of its original author

source: https://www.slideshare.net/mumbaikaar/final-report-mumbaikarsforsgnpproject



Some articles:

Quote:A leopard killed a 70-year-old man in a locality on the periphery of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai on Tuesday morning, police said.

Arjun Dadgu Waghe, who stayed at the Gaiganshah durgah in Adivasipada locality near the wildlife sanctuary, was attacked when he was sitting in front of the durgah, the police said.
His mutilated body was found 500 metres away from the durgah two hours later.
On June 19, a leopard killed Kuldeep Singh Gurbux, an advocate from Mulund Colony, when he had gone for a jog inside the national park.
Tuesday's incident marks the eighth killing of a human being in the national park, forest department authorities said.

https://www.rediff.com/news/2004/jun/22mum.htm

Quote:With this, six persons have fallen prey to the wild cat this month alone. Nine people have been killed this year in leopard attacks.

Raju Yadav, 18, a resident of Aarey Colony in suburban Goregaon was killed when he was attacked by a leopard late on Sunday night, a senior police officer said.

Kashababu Pujari, 55, a resident of Gaibaccha durgah located inside the park in Mulund in northern Mumbai was killed early Monday morning.

The injured, both government employees, were attempting to tranquilise a leopard that had strayed into Raheja Vihar
housing colony on the outskirts of the national park in Borivali when the cat attacked them. Both have been admitted to the nearby Bhagwati Hospital.

They have been identified as Vaibhav Patil, a forest employee, and police constable Suresh Dhamapurkar.

https://www.rediff.com/news/2004/jun/28kill.htm



More Recent Cases


Forest Ranger (?) killed by Leopard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vwh-vAaD83I


Two Villagers killed by Leopard:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ClplTARvA



Comparisons with Other Areas or Predators

Quote:Bombay presents an exaggerated vision of what L.A.'s future could be. Not that cougars are likely ever to attack people at anywhere near the rate achieved by Bombay’s leopards. The mountain lion is, as Theodore Roosevelt observed, “the least dangerous to man of all the big cats,” a fact for which Americans can be thankful. But Bombay’s crisis stems from the same confluence of factors that has caused L.A.'s recent big-cat troubles: a clash between a conservation success and a land-use planning failure.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jan-09-op-leopards9-story.html


^ The Cougar is no where near as dangerous to man as the Leopard (especially the ones in Mumbai)




Comparisons of Leopards in other locations

Quote:In 2004, leopards killed 19 people in Mumbai. Although fatal attacks have diminished since 2007 (Fig. 7.1), they show the scale of a problem that has receivedextensive local and even international media coverage. These attacks took placeinside or on the edge of the Sanjay Gandhi National Park (SGNP), mainly in areas occupied by slums. They raised questions about the wisdom of siting a national
 park in a megacity of some 20 million inhabitants, the excessive density of the leopard population, and a way of managing space which in 1995 has seen more than 500,000 slum dwellers living in the park.That at least is the view one might take on consideration of the Mumbai case alone. 

However, a comparative approach prompts a different way of thinking about things. In Nairobi, a city of 4 million people, the national park of the same name also borders slum areas and is home to a fairly dense population of leopards (as well as lions, hyenas and hippopotamuses), which represents a potential danger. Yet no wild animals have killed human beings in the park in living memory, other than a few incautious tourists who have left their cars to take close-up photographs of lioncubs jealously protected by their mothers

^ There are many humans killed by Leopards in Mumbai, compared to virtually no animal related deaths in Nairobi. Both are mega cities at the edge of wilderness.

Quote:Our initial hypothesis was that a different form of park management, more in harmony with that of the city, might explain the absence of leopard attacks on humans in Nairobi. We speculated that the actors in the two spheres coordinate their efforts to ensure better oversight of wildlife. This hypothesis was not confirmed. Instead, we saw the importance of factors such as predation by leopards on populations of domestic dogs, the landscape configurations of the interfaces between park and city, and the diversity of representations of nature or social disparities, which generate differing vulnerabilities. This leads to a two-level conclusion regarding the role of the national trajectories in these countries of the Global South in respect of environmental concerns and their contribution to the new ways of understanding our relation to nature.

^ Conclusion of the difference of the Leopard populations

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/326523081_Why_Did_Leopards_Kill_Humans_in_Mumbai_but_not_in_Nairobi_Wildlife_Management_in_and_Around_Urban_National_Parks_The_Quest_for_Naturbanity Reply