Shooting Times & Country Magazine
A sporting life in Africa
Leopards may be beautiful, but macabre tales warn that it pays to take great care to avoid them
This week, a leopard ate a man a couple of miles away from us. His name was Eric and he was of unsound mind, according to the ranger’s report I heard. Eric was a young fellow, about 22, who recently appeared wandering around a neighbour’s place, where his father had once worked as a labourer. Wearing not a stitch of clothing, he was living off the land, which is arid and blasted by a long drought, so jolly hard to survive in. I am told somebody on the farm collected Eric and returned him to his home, way over the horizon.
The acacia-bush country around us is intensely populated with game of all kinds, including buffalo, elephant and plenty of other prey for big cats. Almost every night, we hear lion. When we go out for walks, we always take a rifle — quite often a .458 — and move gently, with respect for what’s downwind or beyond the next thicket.
Over my farming years, I have lost more livestock to leopard than to lion, cheetah or hyena. Once, a large leopard got in with the sheep at night. Since it found itself stuck in the enclosure, with the armed shepherd asleep, it killed nearly 20 before sunrise.
I’ve also had leopards find their way into the cattle boma (night enclosure) several times after dark. One evening, while a cow was calving, a cat slunk in undetected and began to eat the calf as it was being born. The young creature’s first breath was in the jaws of the predator preying on it. The bellowing cow raised the alarm, but by the time the guards arrived, it was too late.
Man-eater
A few days ago, lured or driven for reasons that will always remain a mystery, Eric wandered back to the neighbour’s farm. The leopard, likely a male, pounced on him and broke his neck with one bite. In our district, there have been many leopard attacks, though not quite like this.
Leopard tend to hunt baboons, warthogs, antelope and small game. But my friend Hannes Wessels, a veteran of the Rhodesian Light Infantry and a professional hunter of many years, says that attacks on humans in Africa are “not common but do happen” when older leopards have blunted teeth and can no longer hunt properly.
Hannes then tells me a story about Paul, a friend of his in Victoria Falls. He was in his kitchen when a leopard exploded through the window as it tried to snatch a toddler from inside the house. As Paul wrestled with the cat, the African mother picked up her child, ran to the bathroom, stuffed him into the loo, put the lid down and sat on it until danger passed. Leopards rip one to shreds. Luckily for Hannes’s friend, mid-struggle, a neighbour appeared with a shotgun and killed the beast under the kitchen sink.
The lower half of Eric’s body was eaten by the leopard. Despite being an older animal, it was still powerful enough to pull the thorax, with head and arms still attached, high into a wild caper tree. Leopards use trees as a larder, placing their prey out of the reach of rival predators and scavengers.
The macabre thing is that this tree was close to the neighbour’s farmstead. Within hours, a man passing nearby caught the whiff of decomposing flesh, looked up into the branches to behold the half-eaten human above him. The police took the remains of the poor fellow away. Wildlife services then placed camera traps in the tree, in case the animal returns. No doubt it will then be shot.
Scavengers
Nobody knows how many African leopard survive, but they are in the hundreds of thousands. Like foxes, they stray into urban areas and scavenge rubbish or domestic pets. I’ve often seen them on Nairobi’s roads. Up our way, we have about six melanistic leopards, or black panthers, which are beautiful creatures. I value our leopards on the farm, although we put the dogs away at dusk because leopards like to prey on dogs more than almost anything.
Last month, I heard a faint sound outside the bedroom window, parted the curtains and looked into the eyes of a leopard. It had smelled the dogs and was keen on a midnight feast. Hannes advises that the leopard which killed the unfortunate man this week must be taken out. “They get used to it, especially when they see how easy it is to kill a human. This animal might well kill again. In fact, it’s highly likely that it will become a man-eater.” They say that in India not so long ago, a leopard managed to kill 150 people.