Bingo.

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.  

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!