Leopards Like To Feed On Domesticated Dogs

Leopards that prowl around rural India have an interesting favourite food: dogs. These large felines seem to prefer eating domestic dogs even in areas where there are goats, cows and other farm animals according to the results of a new study.

Conservationists took a close look at leopard poop to reconstruct their diets. A team of scientists with the Wildlife Conservation Society looked at 85 leopard faecal samples in Western Maharashtra India. The scientists took the specimens back to the lab looking for claws, hair, hoofs or other indigestible parts of prey.

Domestic dogs seemed to be the most common prey that researchers found, making up 39 per cent of the diet of a leopard. In 15 per cent of faecal samples, domestic cats were found accounting for 12 per cent of the mass of a leopard meal. Interestingly enough, livestock made up a relatively small fraction of the leopard diet. Despite being more than seven times more abundant than domestic dogs, livestock accounted for just 11 per cent of the mass of a leopards meals in the study area.

Most of the leopards diet comes from domestic animals (87 per cent) which includes both pets and livestock. This indicates that though the leopard is wild, they are completely dependent on human related sources of food. The wild animals that did appear in the leopards diet include mainly rodents as well as civets, birds, mongooses and monkeys.

The researchers reckon that domestic animals are easier to hunt for leopards because they do not engage in anti predatory behaviour in contrast to their counterparts in the wild. Dogs which roam free may be very easy targets because they are not guarded in the same way as economically valuable livestock.

“During the past two to three decades, legal regulation of leopard hunting, increased conservation awareness and the rising numbers of feral dogs as prey have all led to an increase in leopard numbers outside of nature reserves in agricultural landscapes. While this is good news for conservation and a tribute to the social tolerance of Indian people, it also poses major challenges of managing conflict that occasionally breaks out. Only sound science can help us face this challenge.” study researcher Ullas Karanth, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s director for Science-Asia, said in a statement.