The Leopard of Panar
The Leopard of Panar was responsible for the deaths of more than 400 people in the Kumaon, a district in northern India notorious for man-eaters (see the Champawat Tigress later in the list). That the long and bloody career of so cunning and ferocious an animal was ended by the most celebrated sportsman in India seems appropriate. It was shot in 1910 by Jim Corbett, the legendary big-game hunter who, it is worth noting, became an important figure in the history of conservation, setting up an eponymous national park in Uttarakhand and swapping the shotgun for a camera.
The Leopard of Panar’s man-eating career was aided by the geography of its home territory. Panar in the early-twentieth-century was remote, and firearms were extremely rare. Thus the brazen leopard would attack villagers returning home at dusk, or even enter their homes at night, and eat its victims at leisure, none being brave enough to confront it. The area also lacked in the once-ubiquitous big game hunters of India, leaving the leopard free to bring fear and destruction to the inhabitants until Corbett was summoned to Panar in 1910. The rest of India barely took notice, either.
The old big game hunters reckoned the leopard to be the most ferocious of adversaries, beside which even lions appeared positively cowardly. The leopard’s aggression and bravery coupled with its other key attributes – stealth, climbing ability, nocturnal habits – make this man-eater utterly nightmarish. Fearless of men, silent, and extremely aggressive, it is no wonder the locals refused to go near its kills in spite of their religious beliefs about cremating their dead. With its willingness to enter homes and villages, all life was subject to the whims of the Leopard of Panar while it lived.
Faced with a beast whose cunning was matched only by its aggression and strength, Corbett had to be extremely careful. Thus he tethered a goat as bait, and took his position in a nearby tree which he had clad with blackthorns. Upon arriving, the leopard showed no interest in the goat, but noisily attempted to dislodge the thorns from around the tree to get at Corbett. After eating hundreds of human victims, the leopard had no fear of man, and showed remarkable enthusiasm to take a tree-bound human over an easy meal of goat.
Finally giving up trying to climb the tree, the leopard reluctantly turned its attention to the goat, and Corbett pulled the trigger. The animal fled, wounded, and upon being traced the next day it was yet more savage: ‘I have seen a line of elephants that were staunch to tiger turn and stampede from a charging leopard’, shudders Corbett. Holding his nerve, Corbett unleashed a flurry of slugs into the onrushing man-eater’s chest. After catching his breath and wiping his brow, Corbett theorized that its taste for human flesh came from scavenging on the victims of a cholera outbreak.