Pune: Wildlife SOS Pulls Out All Stops To Reunite Leopard Cubs With Mother’s 

Pune, 13th July 2022:

Wildlife SOS and the Maharashtra Forest Department have consistently been training the locals on human-leopard conflict mitigation in the Junnar region, Pune district. These training and awareness programs have ensured the successful reunions of over 90 leopard cubs with their mothers over the years!

For farmers in Maharashtra, it has become all too common to find leopard cubs among their sugarcane fields. As it turns out, leopard mothers find the tall dense fields to be a safe abode for their cubs to hide among while she goes hunting.

In every reunion and rescue operation, the locals are important facilitators, without whose support and timely calls, the operation would not be possible, let alone a success. In areas located in proximity to leopard habitats, the locals, including school children, are taught about leopard behaviour, conflicts and conservation. In these workshops, Wildlife SOS also focuses on increasing people’s tolerance, diminishing their fears and stifling misbeliefs about these animals.

The team at Wildlife SOS operating out of the Manikdoh Leopard Rescue Centre in Junnar, possess adequate training and expertise in dealing with highly critical missions that could turn dangerous at any moment. The team assists the Forest Department in such operations using the latest technology of camera traps and IP cameras, which help in successful reunions and also prove useful during conflict mitigation.

With years of accumulated knowledge and research on wildlife habitats, ecology and behaviour of individual species, the team is able to ensure that reunions are carried out with the least distress to the cubs and their mothers. For instance, the veterinarians ensure that handling of the cubs is kept to a minimum to not make them further anxious. Minimizing the time of separation between cubs and mothers is an important contributing factor to a successful reunion. When placing the cubs in a safe box for the reunion process, the team also lines the box with scent markings like the cub’s urine drops to help the mother leopard locate them more easily. 

The youngest cub to be reunited this year was 14 days old, found in a field near Otur forest range, Pune. The Forest Department contacted the Wildlife SOS team to assist with the cub’s rescue, who placed her in the field in a ventilated transparent box, where the mother found her cub. She is one among the 16 cubs reunited with mothers this harvest season in Maharashtra by Wildlife SOS and the Forest Department!

Dr Nikhil Bangar, Wildlife Veterinary Officer, Wildlife SOS, said, “The sugarcane harvest season in Maharashtra especially sees many cases of leopard cubs being found among the fields. The locals in these regions have been prompt in alerting us or the forest department ever since we have been conducting awareness programs for them on conflict mitigation.”

Kartick Satyanarayan, Co-founder & CEO of Wildlife SOS, said, “It is very crucial for displaced leopard cubs to be reunited with their mother as these cubs learn vital skills for their survival in the wild from her until about two years of age. It is only with the support of locals and the forest department that we have successfully reunited over 90 cubs to date and shall undertake all efforts to do so in the future.”