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Wildbuzz | Leopard best buddies
They were later named Ganesh and Vitthal by caregivers at the Manikdoh Leopard Rescue Centre. Ganesh had been attacked by a mob and left severely wounded in 2011.
In the wilderness, two adult male leopards grooming and nuzzling each other would constitute an exotic spectacle as they tend to battle fiercely for territorial rights and eke out mostly isolated lives.
But forced captivity, a result of their persecution by humans, yielded a stirring saga of bonding, an intriguing friendship that outlasted a decade and is still going strong. The roots of their relationship lies in their rescues from different spots and circumstances in Maharashtra years ago by the NGO, Wildlife SOS.
They were later named Ganesh and Vitthal by caregivers at the Manikdoh Leopard Rescue Centre. Ganesh had been attacked by a mob and left severely wounded in 2011.
Ganesh had to be operated on for a severely infected left eye. He developed a cataract in his right eye, permanently impairing vision. Vitthal was wounded by a wire snare trap in 2009. The Wildlife SOS veterinary team toiled hard to save the animal’s life, but could not avert the loss of the right hind paw,” stated the SOS media spokesperson.
A return to the wilderness was no longer possible for the two physically challenged males and they were placed under long-term care at Manikdoh. “Having experienced trauma in the past, the Wildlife SOS team decided to introduce the two leopards to observe their interaction. It was heartwarming to see the males strike up an unlikely friendship and grow inseparable after having spent over a decade in each other’s company. The feline best friends engage in long grooming sessions. Grooming not only serves as a way for big cats to keep clean but it plays an important social role. All cat species groom each other in a gesture of trust, affection or protection,” the spokesperson added.
Cobra hid, rat took blame
Serpents and rodents operating in poorly lit, cluttered living spaces strewn with food wastes bite humans. The prevalent circumstances can lead to a proverbial passing of the buck. As I had pointed out in last week’s columns, the death of Harmeet Kaur of Sector 42, Chandigarh, on September 29, was widely ascribed to snakebite though no conclusive evidence was put forward to support the snake theory. The diabetic woman may have been bitten by either a cobra or a rat and death caused by intense trauma and shock.
The converse also holds true, as manifest in a tragic case from Nayagaon’s Janta Colony a few years back. A girl was bitten, she ascribed it to a rat that had fallen from the hutment’s tin roof. The room was poorly lit, she felt a rat had bitten her as she had glimpsed only one of the possible offending creatures. Her brother rushed her to the GMSH, Sector 16, Emergency, where doctors got confused because the girl started developing symptoms of snake neurotoxic envenomation, such as impaired vision, unconsciousness and breathlessness. As the doctors had been told by the girl’s relatives that a rat had bitten her, they were flummoxed. It led the medics to wrongly speculate she may have been suffering from a brain disorder that had got complicated by the so-called rat bite.
In the meanwhile, as the doctors struggled to arrive at a correct diagnosis and hence a line of treatment beyond the standard emergency responses, her brother went home to get his shoes and clothes. When he reached for the shoes underneath the bed, he saw the hiding Spectacled cobra. In a flash, he realised the culprit was actually the cobra, which had fallen from the tin roof along with the rat. The cobra had been trying to nail the rat among the tin sheets, and both had fallen. The cobra went undetected after biting the girl, but the rat was seen and blamed!
Much the wiser, the brother returned speedily to inform doctors that his sister had been bitten by a cobra and not a rat. But it was too late. His sister, having not been administered anti-venom doses in time due to a floundering diagnosis, breathed her last.
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