M F AHMAD
Daltonganj, Dec 23: The ‘man-eater’ leopard, responsible for taking the lives of two minors in the Garhwa district, is still roaming out and is beyond the automatic cage despite concerted efforts to lure it into the cage with a goat as the bait.
The cage is set up in the prey area and close to the water body as well but the leopard is far shrewd not to fall in it. Last night, this leopard scaled the outer wall of the house of a goat owner at Baligarh under the Ranka block and lifted one of the goats and jumped towards the jungle.
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Dileep Kumar Yadav, the Conservator of forest Garhwa, said: “We have discovered the residue on the kill of the leopard. The family of the goat owner came to know about the missing goat this morning.”
Sources said local people are convinced that forest officials are concerned about the menace in the real sense. The public caution carried out by the forest personnel has proved enormously useful in making people aware of the leopard in the villages who are now moving in a bunch of 4 or 5 people while women and children are trying to keep indoors as far as possible.
The CF agreed that the leopard is not exclusively a man-eater but it is surely a mix of both man-killing and man-eating. He said there is no denying the fact that this leopard has a combination of two killing small cattle and big cattle like buffalo etc and eating human flesh.
He said barring one episode when this leopard had eaten the flesh of the boy of Rodo village, it had not succeeded in eating any more of human flesh.
Sources said the forest personnel have collected a sufficient number of the copy of the pug marks of the leopard.
