An ailing leopard cub which was being treated by veterinary
doctors in Muzaffarabad died on Thursday evening — hardly 15 hours after
it was rescued by wildlife guards from a mountain village of Azad Jammu
and Kashmir (AJK), an official said.
The one-year-old
cub from the family of common leopards, zoologically referred to as
Panthera Pardus, had descended on Ghaziabad village of district Bagh
from nearby forests at about 5pm on Wednesday.
Naeem
Iftikhar Dar, director AJK wildlife and fisheries department, said the
cub was ill when it suddenly appeared in a small bazaar in the area, to
the fear of the people present there.
Ostensibly due to illness, it took refuge in a vacant shop whose shutter was immediately pulled down by the people from outside.
Meanwhile,
dozens of other people, many of them wielding sticks, gathered at the
place. Subsequently, two senior officials from the local administration
and forests department also rushed to the spot along with police to
ensure that no one caused any harm to the frightened cub.
The
AJK Wildlife Act provides legal protection to the leopard, placing it
in the third schedule among animals that cannot be killed, captured or
kept in possession. However, the law at the same time allows shooting of
the carnivore in an act of self-defence or protecting livestock outside
the demarcated forests.
Dar said the forests department
officer called him with a request to send a team of skilled persons to
cage the animal. The team, led by assistant director Sakhi Zaman,
reached Ghaziabad at about midnight.
As the team
possessed just an animal transportation cage and no tranquilizer gun, it
took them more than three hours to cage the animal which was eventually
brought to the wildlife office in Muzaffarabad at 6:30am on Thursday.
Veterinary doctors started providing treatment to the cub at the
disease investigation centre of the AJK animal husbandry department, he
said, adding that the animal, however, could not survive and died in the
evening.
He said the postmortem of the cub would be
conducted to determine the exact cause of its death, following which its
skin would be flayed for stuffing.
The authoritative Red
List of Threatened Species compiled by the International Union for the
Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies Panthera Pardus as “near
threatened” species.
In Pakistan, this species is found
in the mountains of Kashmir, adjoining Murree hills and parts of Khyber
Pakhtunkhwa. Although according to IUCN Red List their population is
decreasing, wildlife officials in AJK claim indirect evidence has shown
that it has increased in AJK over the past decade.
The
numbers of many wildlife species have increased in AJK over the years
due to certain conservation initiatives by the concerned government
departments as well as awareness in the communities, Dar said, adding
that this increase had led to the shrinkage of available habitat of
these animals which was why some animals occasionally descend on human
populations in search of space and food.
“When these animals kill livestock, they are attacked by villagers in retaliation or revenge,” he said.
Dar regretted that his department was ill-equipped to handle such situations.
Lack
of rehabilitation centres, trained staff, and vets specialising in the
treatment of wildlife species had been hampering conservation efforts,
he said.
For the very reason, the cub that died on
Thursday was kept in one of the office rooms of wildlife department with
three electric heaters switched on to maintain room temperature, he
said.
Some five months ago, a similar situation had
arisen in a village of Jhelum Valley district when a leopard entered the
livestock corral of a villager. As the AJK wildlife department
personnel did not possess dart gun to render the carnivore unconscious,
they had brought people from the wildlife department of neighbouring KP
to carry out the task. The animal was later released in Moji Game
Reserve in Leepa valley.