Yet Another Roadkill! Leopard Ran Over By Speeding Vehicle In Assam, Dies

2019 was a bad year for India's wildlife and what we have seen in the first three months of 2020 is anything to go by, this year too could be equally bad or even worse. One species that has increasingly been threatened due to human activity is leopards.

In 2019 the country lost 491 leopards to poaching and accidents. Now yet another leopard was found dead in Assam, ran over by a vehicle. The carcass of the 12-year-old male leopard was found on Guwahati¡¯s Assam Trunk road near Kamakhya temple on Sunday night.

BCCL

The post-mortem reports have revealed that the animal suffered a profuse brain haemorrhage caused by an injury to the head. While the authorities have not been able to trace the vehicle or the driver, the leopard died on the spot. The leopard measured 1m 20 cm in length and 70 cm in height.

The hillocks encircling Guwahati are natural habitats of leopards.

While this is the first leopard death reported in Assam this year, other states like Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh have recorded several cases this year. Last week a three-year-old leopard died after it was hit by an unidentified "speeding" vehicle on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad national highway at Dahanu in Maharashtra.

AFP

The autopsy report stated that the leopard was hit on the head and died due to a cardiac arrest and going by the injuries that the leopard sustained, the autopsy report has stated that the vehicle that knocked the leopard down was "speeding".

Just a few days before that a one-year-old leopard was run over and killed by a speeding truck on National Highway 44 which passes through the buffer zone of Pench Tiger Reserve in Seoni in Madhya Pradesh.

BCCL

But UP has so far recorded the highest number of leopard deaths this year. Till February, there were eight cases in the state, including roadkills and big cats beaten to death by villagers. Three of them were killed by villagers in Bijnor, Moradabad, and Badaun, respectively. In January a leopard, that was believed to be a maneater was shot dead in Haridwar, Uttarakhand.

BCCL

Conservationists and environmentalists have long blamed the shrinking of the big cat's natural habitat as the primary reason for the increase in the number of deaths. Leopards often tend to stray into the human settlements in search of food like dogs and cattle, which results in more human-animal conflicts.