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| Bingo |
And just like that, Bingo is gone!
Carried away by a predator right off the
front porch.
Still can’t believe it.
The day started ordinarily enough.
The previous night quite late, a neighboring stray dog had
come near the gate - Bingo had gotten into a nasty fight and come back with a
few injuries. They didn’t seem too bad so I thought I would check him in the
morning and apply some medication. For
those of you who are not familiar with Bingo, he had walked into my farm about
3 years back. Extremely wary of humans,
he would not let anyone touch him, and would snap back if startled. He would
appear at the dogs’ meal times, and I started keeping out a bowl of food for
him. He would wolf it down and run off. Slowly
he had started spending more time and started trusting me. When I kept a cut out car tire with a cushion
in it, he would curl up in it. And soon
he took up permanent residence on the farm.
He would join me on walks with Zuki and Perl.
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| Out for a walk |
Slowly over a period of time, he started letting
me pat his head and even allowed me to put a collar on him. But applying medicine or touching a wound was
still out of limits, and hence I decided to do it during the day when it would be bright and he would be a little
more relaxed. But I did not get a
chance.
So as I said, the day had begun as usual – but yet not
quite. The dogs had created a ruckus before dawn. I had ignored it thinking it would be the
usual boars traipsing around. Perl and
Zuki who would normally run out when I open the main door, refused to step out
and were barking in the direction of the forest. When I opened the side door from where I can
see the forest beyond the rough embankment, Perl ran away from the door and
started barked her head off.
Strange. I walked to the upper
room to see if I could spot anything beyond the embankment, but I could not see
anything. I went out onto the
porch. Bingo was not there, but he would
often run around in the mornings so I did not think it unusual. But Perl was sniffing around very strangely.
I took my coffee and stood near the side door and as I was
sipping, I noticed it - a smoothening of the gravelly mud from the
porch side almost as if something had been dragged over it. A chill feeling in my heart – I stepped out towards
it. Perl followed and kept sniffing over that streak of smoothened mud all the
way till the embankment. She seemed
extremely wary as she kept sniffing and treading around. I walked back to the porch. And that’s when I noticed all the other signs
– my shoes which are normally placed neatly were strewn askew, Bingos’ bed was half out of the tyre, and finally faint drag marks across the floor…..There
definitely was a struggle here… Poor, poor Bingo…….such an awful thing to
happen…….
I checked with our vet Dr. Gourish Padukone and he confirmed
that there have been quite a few cases of leopard attacks in this region.
Is there anything that I can do? Well not much really…..probably pay more
attention to the dogs when they bark and create a ruckus. The man-animal conflict only worsens. The forest across the farm on the other side
has been wiped out by the stone quarrying in the last few months.
And not that living in the city seems to offer any protection
from leopard attacks!
So well. Just let it be!
