Unmolested in its natural habitat, Panthera pardus is the most graceful, beautiful and widely distributed of all the big cats and is found throughout Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope and including the jungles of Central Africa where the lion does not occur, and up to the shores of the Mediterranean. It is thinly distributed in Asia Minor and then is more densely distributed from India to the Chinese seaboard and down to Java. It is also found in Sri Lanka. When it comes to survival, it is probably the most successful of all wild felines.
Throughout this vast area the species remains the same, with only sub-specific differences, mainly in size and colouring that would be imperceptible to most people. The panther of India is the same species as the leopard of Africa and the ‘black panther’ is merely a melanistic form that is capable of throwing off normally spotted offspring. The so-called ‘tiger’ or ‘tier’ of South Africa is also the common-or-garden leopard.
The animal is inclined to be a little on the stocky side when conditions are really favourable, but never to the point that it loses its graceful appearance. It weighs on average 45 kilograms (99 pounds) but many males will weigh up 70 kilograms (155 pounds). In captivity leopards can reach almost 100 kilograms (220 pounds). The record length of a leopard is just short of three metres (almost 10 feet), which is not far off the record length for a lion, though a third of a leopard’s length is tail.
The road to the Albert National Park between Lake Kivu and Lake Albert in East Africa is a winding road, which picks its way through damp, lush vegetation, the occasional banana plantation and clusters of beehive huts. On the right of the road and soaring over 4 500 metres (5 000 yards) above the jungle is Mount Mikeno, a volcanic peak that in the swirling mists usually shrouding its head broods like an unhappy ogre. Through glasses you can make out the spot where Carl Ethan Akeley was buried.
Akeley was an American by birth and an African by heart, and his special interest in Africa was its enormous variety of mammals. As a taxidermist and naturalist, the American made five prolonged visits to the continent to collect and to observe, and on his return to America he organised the mounting of some of the world’s finest wildlife museum exhibits, including one tableau of an entire family of elephants. It has been said that his imaginative handling of museum exhibits ended the era where taxidermy was something akin to stuffing teddy bears.
Akeley died a natural death at the age of 62 in November 1926 but twice he had cheated death: once when an elephant badly mangled him and once, in 1896 on his first visit to Africa, when a wounded leopard ambushed him, sending his rifle flying. Akeley’s fight with the leopard illustrates how, if a man keeps his head, he has more than a sporting chance when tackled by one of these animals.
Akeley was caught completely by surprise when the cat came at him and had time only to throw his arm up in front of his face. The leopard seized his arm in its teeth and began clawing at him with its front paws. Akeley, with his free hand, grabbed the cat round the throat and held it away from his body, his main concern being that the leopard might bring up its back legs and rip him down the middle; leopards occasionally use this tactic, although in most attacks they prefer to latch on with their front claws and then tear with their teeth. The taxidermist tightened his grip on the cat’s throat and slowly worked his arm out of its mouth every time he felt its jaws relax. Soon only his fist was in its mouth and this he kept there so that the leopard could not bite his face and head. Akeley then deliberately fell on top of the animal and dug his knees into its rib cage and his elbows into the leopard’s armpits, to force its flailing front claws apart. Slowly the cat went limp. By the time Akeley rose the leopard was dead. It had died from strangulation and its ribs were cracked from the pressure Akeley had exerted. Akeley’s escape is by no means unique – wounded leopards, ferocious though they are, rarely manage to kill their human victims and usually end up running away.
The leopard, whether it is hunting along the nullahs of India or on the African veld, is something of a Jekyll and Hyde. Unmolested and in normal health, it is a shy, nervous animal with a very marked fear of man. It pursues mainly small prey and unlike the lion or tiger, both of which normally move out of a person’s way with aplomb and dignity, the leopard will usually run, perhaps pausing to cast a quick glance over its shoulder. Should you make a sudden movement the cat will spring into the nearest thicket and flee like a startled hare. But when a leopard is wounded, trapped or cornered, it can be an entirely different animal. A wounded leopard is likely to attack the first man to come within striking distance. Colonel Stevenson-Hamilton described a wounded leopard at bay as ‘the very incarnation of ferocity’1 – its ears are laid back low against a flat-looking head, its teeth gleam between withdrawn and snarling lips, while its eyes, ‘fixed with steady and sinister stare upon his enemy, and filled with dull, greenish red light, glare murderous hate. Even when you know his back to be broken, his appearance is so little assuring that you have qualms about approaching close to administer the coup de grâce.’
It is strange that a creature so well equipped in tooth and claw, so given to fierce attacks when wounded and so capable of lightning action should, at the same time, find it difficult to overpower a man (I am referring not to confirmed man-eaters but to the ‘incidental’ attackers such as freshly wounded ones). It is not as if the leopard lacks strength: its strength is one of its most astonishing characteristics. T. Murray Smith saw a ‘150 lb [68-kilogram] leopard kill a 90 lb (41-kilogram] antelope, and carry it in its jaws like a dog carrying a hare’ and then climb up a tree with the buck in its jaws2. This feat is by no means unusual. Leopards frequently carry their prey into trees out of reach of hyaenas, jackals and lions and there is a record of one carrying a 90-kilogram (200-pound) baby giraffe four metres (13 feet) up a tree. There are instances where it has dragged humans into its ‘larder’ in the branches of trees.
When tackling a man, the leopard appears to rely on fast claw work and repeated biting to overcome its victim – unlike a lion or tiger, which often kills by cuffing a victim or biting into the neck. The leopard’s fear of man could be a mark of its intelligence and, along with its nocturnal habits, is one of the chief reasons it has survived within sight of large cities and even in suburban hills.
This apparent feeling on the part of the leopard that discretion is the better part of valour is often manifest when the cat is attacking a baboon troop and runs into a big male. I recall such an incident. The male baboon immediately attacked the stalking leopard and, screaming at the top of its lungs, it tore at the cat’s neck and shoulders with its long canines. The leopard, spitting and snarling, rolled in the dust with the baboon and then withdrew and tried to ‘box’ the animal with open claws, but the baboon knew better and once again closed in and began biting. After perhaps a minute the big cat disengaged itself and fled ignominiously, leaving a badly torn baboon licking his wounds.
In the past many, if not most, people mauled by leopards died from infection. Gee states that the incidence of infection from leopard wounds (in India) was higher than with tiger’s3. Penicillin has cut deaths from infection to less than 10 per cent of people mauled.
Going by the very inadequate statistics available from local authorities, wildlife bodies and (mainly) incidents reported in newspapers, there are probably a few hundred attacks a year in Africa. Again, relying only on anecdotal material, it seems that in most cases leopards lose out and there are many instances where they have been killed by hand.
In collecting data for Man is the Prey4 I found not a single reported instance of man-eating in South Africa prior to when the book was published in 1968. I came across none afterwards – not until the 1990s when suddenly, in the Kruger Park, there was a change in behaviour. The first incident of which I am aware was in 1992 when a leopard entered a window (an extremely rare event) and dragged Thomas Rihlamfu, a game guard in the northern region, out of his sleeping quarters. It partly fed on him. A year or two went by and then a woman was ambushed and partly eaten as she walked home in Skukuza Camp’s staff village – Skukuza, the sprawling ‘capital’ of Kruger, has a busy staff village that is almost suburban. Then a schoolboy – the son of a staff member – was killed near his home returning from school in the late afternoon. In each case it was a different leopard. In August 1998 a leopard killed a recently graduated ranger, Charles Swart (25), who was taking tourists on a night drive and had stopped for a smoke break on a bridge in the south of the park. It was 6.45 pm and dark and the tourists were standing 50 metres (55 yards) away when they heard the ranger’s rifle clatter to the ground. In the torch light they saw a leopard standing over him. When two of the tourists ran shouting towards the scene, the leopard dragged its victim into the bush. The leopard was feeding on its victim when rangers arrived and shot it. It proved to be an old male in very poor condition. In its pelt were many bite and scratch wounds, indicating that it might have been involved in territorial fights with younger leopards.
A month later, just after sunrise, a large male leopard leapt at the windscreen of a utility vehicle near Hazyview just outside the Kruger Park’s southwest border and jumped over the cab roof and into the back of the vehicle, which was loaded with labourers. Six had to be hospitalised and one had lost the flesh on his forehead, eyebrows and part of his cheeks. One of his companions managed to kill the leopard by stabbing it repeatedly with a small screwdriver.
This sudden spate of attacks in this specific region – leopards are found in many parts of South Africa – might have been because of the unknown numbers of Mozambicans killed and eaten in recent years while crossing illegally into South Africa via the Kruger Park at night. Lions and leopards were finding them easier prey than antelope, and the park’s authorities issued a warning that habitual man-eating was becoming a problem. At first those crossing were refugees from the internecine wars in Mozambique, but more recent trespassers are in search of work or even ‘just passing through to shop in South Africa’ according to a senior ranger. A ranger one night was sent with trackers to capture a large party returning across the park to Mozambique; they had been spotted loaded with goods and moving east across the park at night. Laden as they were, the ranger was unable to keep up with them.
Dr Willem Gertenbach, the Kruger’s former nature conservation manager, who is greatly concerned with the increase in man-eating, was quoted as saying, ‘The problem is not the [predators] but the illegal immigrants. The big cats have not so much acquired the taste for human flesh but [have] developed an instinct that people on foot are much easier to stalk and catch than, say, an impala.’5
He said this was particularly true of older animals who found it difficult to hunt.
This was certainly aberrant behaviour for leopards in Southern Africa. In the space of four years in the 1960s I meticulously combed what records existed (mainly newspaper files) and found 32 cases of leopard attacks in South Africa and neighbouring Namibia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. This does not mean, of course, that there were only 32 attacks in those years. There were undoubtedly many unrecorded6. What is significant is that, of the 32 reported attacks (some involving three or four people), none was fatal. Thirty-one people were mauled, most of them severely, while eight of the 32 survived unscratched. Of the 32 leopards, all had been provoked by being wounded or by being attacked by the victims’ dogs. Ten leopards escaped and were not heard of again, 10 were shot, seven were speared, clubbed or axed to death and five were killed bare-handed. In four of the attacks the victims were able to punch the leopard on the nose and in all four of these instances the leopard broke off the engagement, in one of them only temporarily.
In the 1960s a 70-year-old Zimbabwean, Kudziburira, in the Sinoia district, took his dog and an axe to look for a leopard that had killed one of his goats. The dog flushed the leopard and was immediately killed. The cat then turned on the old man, who in his fright dropped his axe. The leopard bit into his left arm, which the man had thrown up to protect his face. Using his free hand, the man gripped the cat by the throat and held it there until he felt its jaws relaxing. Then pulling his arm from its mouth he put both hands round the cat’s neck and strangled it. Two months later, Castelo Branco Montero of Lourenço Marques (now Maputo), Mozambique, was attacked by a wounded leopard, which he managed to strangle, and not long afterwards Anselmo Gomes Matos strangled a leopard with his bare hands at Silva Porto just north of Namibia in Angola. In all these incidents the men were mauled7. In an incident in Kenya, Daniel M’Mburugu (73) was tending his crops outside the village of Kihatu near Mount Kenya when a leopard charged out of the long grass and, as he put up his arm to defend himself, it seized his wrist. He managed to get his hand down its throat and seize the root of its tongue, whereupon it began to choke. Villagers, hearing his screams and armed with pangas, rushed to his aid and killed it.
There are literally scores of such incidents on record, one of a man who is reputed to have killed two leopards by crashing their heads together. The man who is said to have performed this feat was Cottar, a Texan who became a professional hunter in East Africa and who, according to J.A. Hunter, killed three leopards bare-handed in his career8. (Cottar was later killed by a black rhinoceros in the most ridiculous manner: he was filming it charging for a female client and must have been unused to the view-finder, as his finger was still on the button when the rhino horned him.)
It is interesting that some hunters class the leopard as the most dangerous of all the big-game animals to hunt. Hunter called it ‘the most dangerous game’. Ionides also considered it the most dangerous animal in the world and Rushby classed it as more dangerous when wounded than a wounded buffalo9. He described the leopard as a ‘perfectly built killing machine’ and said that as a target it was so small and so fast that it was most difficult to hit. To make things doubly difficult for the hunter, the leopard specialises, a little like the tiger, in short-range charges. Yet I have found no record of a hunter being killed by a leopard.
There is a theory that a female leopard will charge a man on sight if she has her cubs with her. Ted Reilly of Mlilwane Game Sanctuary in Swaziland told me how he once came across a leopard cub in the bush and, after observing it for some time, decided it was orphaned or abandoned. He picked it up. Even as he straightened up he could sense danger and, as he stood holding the bundle in his arms, he found himself looking into the eyes of the mother. Reilly, alone and unarmed, fairly jumped out of his skin. His involuntary movement caused the leopard to turn and flee. I have been told of other incidents where female leopards have abandoned their young under fraught circumstances. An Acholi game ranger in Queen Elizabeth National Park in Uganda was not so fortunate the day he cycled past a leopard cub. Guessing the mother would not be far away, he pedalled harder. The next thing he knew the mother was running behind him. She sprang onto his back where she remained firmly latched like a pillion passenger as the ranger put on an admirable burst of speed. The leopard, not terribly used to riding on a bicycle, fell off 200 metres (220 yards) further along. A similar incident befell Arian Suque of Dodoma, Tanzania, when a leopard with three cubs attacked him and pushed him off his bike. Suque fought the leopard and she ran off, but a minute later she came back for another round. Again Suque fought her and again she retreated. But this was an occasion when the leopard came out on top: she punctured the man’s wheel and he had to walk 16 kilometres (10 miles) to hospital.
At the state opening of Kenya’s parliament in 1963, Senator Godfrey Kipbury, a Maasai member of the Senate, made a grand entrance wearing a smelly, fresh leopard-skin hat. Forty-eight hours before, the senator had speared the leopard on his farm but was clawed in the process. Annually scores of leopards are speared, mainly because of their threat to livestock.
Although India, through the writings of such men as Jim Corbett, has received more attention regarding its man-eating leopards, Africa also has a history. Throughout its range the leopard, when it does turn man-eater, goes mainly for children or sick adults. Ionides says a leopard around the village of Masaguru on the Ruvuma River, in the notorious Southern Province of Tanzania, preyed only upon ‘children and small women’. It was known to have killed 26 yet not one victim was eaten. Not even a bite was taken from them and when eventually it was shot it was found to be in good shape10.
Rushby surmised that leopards eat humans merely for variety. He points out that, even as man-eaters, they still continue to kill and eat monkeys and baboons as well. In fact, says Rushby, there cannot be much difference between human meat and monkey meat and therefore there is no reason for the leopard to become addicted to human meat11. Rushby was senior game ranger in the Njombe district in the Southern Province and he recorded ‘at least fifteen people a year’ falling prey to leopards during the 1950s. In recent times both Mozambique and Tanzania record the occasional death by leopard.
Most of Africa’s man-eating leopards have been reported in Central Africa where they have caused entire villages to be abandoned. Some of the man-eaters are crippled or enfeebled by old age, such as one that killed 22 people in northern Mozambique. It was too weak even to carry its victims off and would tear chunks out of them and then limp away into the night.
Ionides described the depredations of a man-eater that haunted Ruponda in Tanzania’s Southern Province in 1950 and which might have been forced into man-eating because of the ill-fated British Groundnut Scheme. Workers had been clearing the bush for kilometres around and the leopard’s natural prey had entirely disappeared. The leopard began by killing a labourer but, before it could eat him, it was beaten off by villagers. That same night, 10 kilometres (six miles) away, it ate a baby after stealing it from its bed. Two days later it hid behind some scrub and watched a mother teaching her toddler to walk; then when the mother went indoors for a few seconds the leopard snatched up the child and later ate it. Trackers found that the leopard must have crouched behind the bush for some time waiting for a chance to spring. Two more children were taken near Ruponda before Ionides got to the village, and then the leopard struck a fifth child 10 kilometres away. Eighteen children were taken by the same leopard in a few months; the youngest was a six-month-old baby and the oldest a nine-year-old girl. Eventually the leopard was caught in a trap.
In India there have been many notorious man-eaters. One was the Panar leopard, which is supposed to have eaten 400 people before it was shot in the mid 20th century. There was also the man-eating leopard of Rudraprayag of which Jim Corbett wrote in his book of the same title, which ate 125 people during roughly the same period12. The man-eaters of Bihar are said to have eaten 300 people between 1949 and 1960. There is a host of others, such as the Gummalapur man-eater that was shot by Kenneth Anderson after it had eaten 42 people, that have plagued the wild and beautiful valleys of central and northern India.
It seems that individual man-eating leopards in India kill a significantly greater number of victims than their counterparts in Africa. One reason could be that the man-eaters of India appear to survive a great deal longer than the man-eaters of Africa; the Indian rural dweller is less equipped and less persistent when pursuing man-eaters than Africans, who were in any event assisted by the well-armed colonialists, who remained entrenched in Africa long after the colonialists had departed India. Jim Corbett, who shot both the Rudraprayag leopard and the Panar leopard, puts the high incidence of man-eating down to the way Hindus, in times of plague or famine when there is no time to burn their dead as they normally do, put pieces of charcoal into the corpses’ mouths and leave them in the bush so leopards, always partial to carrion, acquire a taste for human flesh.
The whole character of a man-eating leopard differs from that of a mauler. Man-eaters show no ill-temper but instead hunt with extraordinary calm and cunning. In India, as in Africa, most of them specialise in children. Gee mentions how leopards usually hang about on the outskirts of villages, in the hope of knocking down stray livestock or village dogs, and so become familiar with the ways of men, though they rarely lose their caution13. Only a few become contemptuous of man – the man-eater of Panar was one of them.
When, in 1910, Jim Corbett was called upon by the Indian government to hunt down the Panar man-eater, he made straight away for the area, which was not very far from where he lived at Nianital in northern India. Questions were being asked in the British House of Commons about this man-eater, since it was picking over the same area as the infamous tigress of Champawat – between the two cats 836 rural people were consumed. It is significant that, until Corbett stepped in, no other hunter had heeded the government’s appeal for somebody to kill the animal. The locals’ reaction, as always, was to barricade themselves in at night – and even during the day when they felt it necessary – and, as a result, the Panar man-eater often tore down doors or burrowed into grass roofs to get at occupants.
As an ‘economic pest’ the leopard accounts for only a small proportion of domestic stock taken annually by predators. Judging by South Africa’s commercial farmers’ experience with goat, sheep and pig losses – jackals take 55 per cent and caracal (lynx) take 30 per cent – the leopard’s predation is not a great problem to commercial farmers14. But, to the rural farmer who owns perhaps one or two goats or pigs, the impact of a single marauding leopard can be devastating.
Beyond ensuring that the leopard’s prey species remain in plentiful supply, there is little that can be done to avoid the occasional leopard attack.