Tense moments prevailed at Malaiyoorani near Sivarakottai at Tirumangalam taluk on Tuesday after villagers spotted two jungle cat kittens in a farmland.
K. Parameswaran, a farmer there, said that he was working with 15 people to harvest corn when two persons spotted the kittens.
“Thinking that they were leopard cubs, they raised an alarm and all the farm workers fled the spot as they feared that the mother could also be nearby,” he said.
The villagers said that the noises made by the kittens which were not the regular sounds of a cat and the distinctive stripes pattern on their fur had led them to believe that the species was something different.
After another villager contacted the District Forest Officer Nihar Ranjan, a team of officials arrived on the spot and identified the kittens to be from the jungle cat species.
Just a few weeks old
“They do not seem more than a few weeks old and seem to have been separated from their mother,” said V. Raveendran, Wildlife Range Officer.
The officials further allayed the fears of the villagers who were scared to come back to work fearing an attack from the mother which would come looking for the kittens.
“Work has to be resumed in the fields and we don’t think the farm workers will come to work easily as they were very scared,” said M. Ramalingam, president of the Madurai District Farmers’ Association.
“Jungle cats are generally harmless. There were fears in this area a few months back after villagers spotted pug marks of what they thought was a leopard and we can now infer that they probably belonged to jungle cats in the area as well,” Mr Raveendran said.
The officials initiated a search for the missing mother but they couldn’t find her and later took the kittens back to the forest department office where they would be examined and released back into the forest within the next few days.
Word, however, quickly spread in the surrounding areas that jungle cat kittens had been found and many excited onlookers collected near the fields to get a glimpse of them.
