Feral Cities (17 page)

India's urban monkeys may cause plenty of problems but there is another, more frightening animal, that prowls the nation's cities.

It's six o'clock on Christmas Day 2011 and Kanjurmarg East is a ghost town.

Usually, this eastern suburb of Mumbai would be teeming with life at this hour, but instead the shops are shut and the street hawkers have long packed up. The children who would normally be playing outside are nowhere to be seen. Even the local factories are idle, their night shifts canceled. The streets are deserted. Instead the suburb's thirty thousand residents are indoors with their doors locked and their windows shut, too frightened to step outside until sunrise.

The fear set in a week earlier. Dilip Dalvi, a worker at Echjay Forgings, had just finished eating his breakfast in Machine Shop B when he saw something move behind one of the machines. He thought it was a dog, but on looking again he soon realized it was no dog.

Dilip ran as fast as his legs would carry him. As he made for the exit, he screamed at his colleagues: “Run! A leopard has come!”

The workshop dissolved into pandemonium. Workers rushed out of the door and slammed it shut behind them, trapping the beast inside. They hurriedly locked the door and then, for good measure, pushed a twenty-two-pound iron block against the entrance.

From inside Machine Shop B came the sound of angry roars and then loud thuds as the trapped leopard began hurling itself against the door. The workers called the police. The police arrived and asked the forest department to come and deal with the trapped leopard.

Then, as the police and workers drank tea while waiting for the forest department to arrive, the leopard once more threw itself against the locked door. This time, the door burst open. The now free leopard, its spotted fur black with machine oil, let out an almighty roar.

Teacups and saucers crashed to the ground, as police and workers fled in panic. For a brief moment, Dilip found himself right in front of the beast, boxed in by the parked police van. But instead of attacking, the leopard dived under the van, before sprinting over the compound wall and into the surrounding slums.

By the time the forest department arrived, the leopard was gone.

Word spread through the suburb about the leopard at the metalworks. As night approached, people retreated inside and traders packed up early. The few shops that stayed open after dark found there were no customers to serve and ended up closing early too.

After a few days the panic began to subside, but then came a second sighting—again on the factory grounds. The forest department sent out a search party. They found scratch marks on a tree and some scat. It was enough to confirm the leopard had been there, but despite their searching they missed the beast itself. The fear set in again and people, once more, shut themselves away after dark. The panic only faded for good after several more days without a sighting.

Leopards are no strangers to India's cities. In 2007 dozens of people in the city of Nashik chased a leopard through the streets,
eventually cornering the animal and beating it to death with sticks and stones. And just a month after the Kanjurmarg East sightings, a leopard ended up on the streets of Guwahati, the largest city in northeast India. It was first seen in the morning, near a crematorium where the funeral for a political leader's son was being held. The police chased the animal away from the VIP-packed funeral, but instead of heading out of the city, the leopard ran toward the busy suburb of Silpukhuri. After evading the police by leaping across several rooftops, the leopard jumped down into the streets below.

Alarmed citizens grabbed iron bars and sticks to defend themselves, and as they tried to scare the beast away, it turned on them. One man had part of his scalp removed by a swipe from one of the leopard's claws. Another was mauled and later died from the severe head and neck injuries the animal inflicted on him. Eventually, the beast was locked inside a shop, tranquilized, and taken to a wildlife sanctuary.

Leopards are even more common in Mumbai. By some measures India's financial capital has the highest density of these endangered cats anywhere on earth. Most of Mumbai's leopards live within Sanjay Gandhi National Park, the forty-square-mile reserve that the city has built itself around. But some have grown used to the busy, noisy streets around them. The stray dogs that roam the slums bordering the park are regular targets, and one of the park's leopards even paid a visit to the five-star Renaissance Hotel that overlooks Powai Lake. Another was caught on security camera entering an apartment block foyer late at night and leaving soon after with a small dog in its jaws.

Attacks on people are rare but not unknown. In 2012 in one of the city's slums, a leopard attacked and dragged away a seven-year-old girl who had gone outside with her mother late at night to go to the toilet. Despite a frantic search through the night, the girl was never seen alive again. The next morning, all that could be found was her severed head.

Although no one was killed or injured by the leopard of Kanjurmarg East, its presence was shocking for a different reason. Most encounters with leopards in Indian cities are attributed to the animals wandering in from rural areas by accident. But unlike the slum where the girl was killed or the apartment block where the dog was snatched, Kanjurmarg East is miles away from the national park. To reach Machine Shop B, the leopard would have had to navigate a forest, pass over railroad tracks, and cross large, busy roads. It would have traveled through a university campus, residential areas, factory grounds, and a huge slum. The Kanjurmarg East leopard was anything but a case of a leopard that had lost its way.

What's more, evidence is mounting that India's leopards live among people far more than anyone imagined.

Vidya Athreya, a biologist at Wildlife Conservation Society-India, is one of the people studying how leopards use human-dominated habitats. “When I started working on this ten years back, I had no clue about leopards living in human-use landscapes, so I also thought that those leopards were abnormal because that was all I had learnt over the years from my peers,” she says.

Her research began in Junnar, an agricultural region about 120 miles east of Mumbai. The region had been having trouble with leopards for years. Livestock and pets had been killed and, on average, about four people were attacked every year. To solve the problem, the region's forest department began capturing leopards and releasing them in wildlife sanctuaries and other remote locations. After doing this for a while it asked Vidya to assess how effective the strategy was.

The findings surprised everyone. Vidya included. “They started catching a load of leopards and leaving them in the forest, but then a lot of people were attacked there. There were about fifty attacks. In a couple of cases the released leopards actually attacked and killed people near the site of release.”

Far from bringing leopards under control, the relocations were making them more dangerous. The trouble was the relocated
leopards were not from the forests they were dumped in. The unfamiliar territory meant they had little idea of where to find food, there were other leopards to deal with too, and the process of relocation had left them stressed. Lost and hungry in an unfamiliar place, the desperate leopards began to see people as a tempting prey.

“I realized that the animals living in human-use landscapes were living there with very low levels of conflict, and when you start taking them out and leaving them in the forests because we expect them to be in the forests, we're actually messing it up,” says Vidya.

“The leopard's home is where it is. It has a social system, mothers, sisters, and aunts all living nearby, and when we mess it up simply because we don't think they should be there we are actually worsening the problem.”

The removals didn't solve the problems back in Junnar, either. Every time a leopard was removed, another took its place. These new leopards were often younger and less used to people and, as such, more likely to try attacking someone or their animals than those that had been captured, which, Vidya discovered, hadn't been much of a threat in the first place. “When I was writing down the reasons for their capture, I realized that all these animals were caught just because they were seen or because they had killed a dog. None of them were caught because they killed people.”

Vidya's findings brought the capture-and-release program to a swift end, but the results fired up her own interest in learning more about how leopards live with people. “I've always been fascinated by large cats and had tried to do some work in the typical protected area in the forest and stuff. But when I started working on the Junnar study, I realized this was way more fascinating than just a leopard in a forest.”

The clash of wildlife, people, and politics proved more complex and intriguing than the usual trips to wildlife sanctuaries. “For me, looking at a BBC documentary on forests, I will fall asleep because it's just so pretty and sterile, but these issues where animals and people are interacting—it's totally stimulating.”

One study took her to Akole, a town of twenty thousand people some thirty-five miles north of Junnar. There she found leopards living in higher densities than in wildlife sanctuaries. At night the cats would venture close to people's homes, sometimes visiting the same house every few days without ever disturbing the occupants who slept outside. There were even leopards giving birth in the sugarcane fields that lay just three hundred feet from the edge of town.

Yet no one in Akole seemed aware of the leopards, and there were no reports of anyone being killed in the town. The leopards, she found, were attracted to town by the large numbers of stray dogs and pigs that lived off the garbage people were dumping in the open. The pigs and dogs came for the rubbish, and the leopards came for them.

A similar pattern may explain why leopards prowl the slums and fringes of Mumbai and other large Indian cities. “It seems to be that in the last twenty or thirty years the kind of organic garbage that has flooded India has allowed a lot of other life, especially feral dogs and pigs, to take up residence in great numbers and that has lead to more leopards coming there,” says Vidya.

In another of her studies, Vidya tracked the movements of Ajoba, an old male leopard whose name means grandfather in Marathi. Ajoba was caught after falling down a well in Takali Dhokeshwar, a village more than a hundred miles from Mumbai. Vidya and her team rescued him, fitted him with a GPS collar, and set him loose so they could follow his travels.

Over the next three months they watched Ajoba travel closer and closer to Mumbai. Along the way he passed through human settlements, crossed roads, and chased stray dogs in the streets. He crossed railroad tracks near train stations and even prowled through an industrial complex on the outskirts of Mumbai before finally settling down in the Sanjay Gandhi National Park. Yet not once on this journey was any sighting of the elderly leopard reported.

The reality is that leopards make no distinction between human and wild habitat, says Vidya. “The question is whose land is it? From
the leopards' perspective, it's their land. It's not aberrant, they live here, and with really low levels of conflict, if you leave them alone. Wild animals do not recognize our protected area borders. Nobody has given them a workshop saying ‘These are the boundaries and you guys should stay inside there.'”

For much of the time leopards live among the people of India unseen and we only hear about it in the rare moments when their cover is blown or they attack. It's not the leopard in the street that's abnormal, it's the urban leopard seen in the street. “In my research I've found, to my greatest surprise, that there are a hell of a lot of animals living among a hell of a lot of people and this is actually the baseline,” Vidya says. “But the media and researchers only look at conflict.”

India's cities are not the only ones with big cats, and the world's most famous large, urban feline lives, appropriately enough, in Hollywood. P-22, a mountain lion, lives in Griffith Park, the home of the Hollywood sign, and his discovery was pure fluke.