In an incident that befuddled forest officials, a male leopard was found burnt to death by electrocution at the top of an electric pole in Telangana’s Nizamabad district.
The incident occurred in the district’s Mallaram village on Monday, in an area just a few hundred metres from the Mallaram forest, Telangana Today reported.
District forest officials told Telangana Today that they are yet to figure out how the leopard found its way up the electric pole in the first place. They, however, ruled out any possibility of poaching. A post-mortem will be conducted, forest officials said.
In February 2016, in a similar incident, a male leopard was found dead atop a 15-ft high transformer in Tamil Nadu’s Tirupur, reported The Hindu.
A Tirupur district forest officer had then told The Hindu that the wild cat may have mistaken the electric pole for a tree, and climbed it to get a better view of the area. Otherwise, he suggested, the animal may have erroneously climbed the pole while chasing a potential prey.
Electrocution remains a persistent problem for wildlife in Telangana and elsewhere. In December 2016, a wild tiger was killed by electrocution when it came into contact with a live wire laid by local boar poachers in Mancherial district.
Among the many animals that are regularly killed by electrocution, leopards and peacocks record the third-highest number of such deaths, according to a study by an NGO.
Hindustan Times quoted figures maintained by the Wildlife Protection Society of India, to report that a total of 355 elephants, 181 flamingoes, 64 leopards and 64 peacocks died due to electrocution from 2010-2016.