A different real-life spectacle awaited the residents of the densely-populated Thirumal Nagar on this city’s periphery on Sunday. As forest officials successfully caged a leopard that strayed into their area in the early hours at the end of a five-hour-long well-coordinated effort, people used to seeing action on their small screens, for a change witnessed the real drama of taming a wild cat in broad daylight from their rooftops.
Three persons, including a videographer of a Tamil television news channel, sustained minor injuries in the leopard attack when they were curiously following the forest personnel on their mission of caging the animal.
A few dwellers of the Slum Clearance Board apartments saw the unusual visitor majestically walking along the road around 5 a.m. and started chasing it with clubs. The leopard tried to hide itself after effortlessly scaling a few compound walls.
When the police received information from one of the residents about the leopard around 5.15 a.m., they did not take it too seriously as they believed that there was no possibility of such a stranger visiting a residential area from the Kalakkad forests of the Kalakkad – Mundanthurai Tiger Reserve, known for its leopard population, 40 km from here. On confirming the news, a few teams of forest personnel were rushed to the spot even as the police ensured the timely arrival of an ambulance and a fire tender.
After veterinarian S. Muthukrishnan tranquillised the big cat with two shots within a gap of 10 minutes, the leopard confined itself in a bathroom behind a house, where it fainted.
After covering the gap between the cage and the bathroom with net, the bathroom door was opened and the animal ambled into the cage at 10.30 a.m. and swooned again even as crowd watching from the terraces cheered the forest personnel with thunderous applause and whistling.
“It is a three-and-a-half year old male leopard in excellent condition… It was released around 2 p.m. near the Gowthalai river region in Mundanthurai division of the KMTR,” J.S. Ambrose, District Forest Officer, Tirunelveli, who camped at the spot, said.
