New Delhi, March 4: The Narendra Modi government's Clean India campaign, if applied appropriately to control garbage disposal, may help curb incursions of leopards into towns, a study of the predator-prey relationships that leopards in India have established with domestic dogs has suggested.
The study by a team of wildlife biologists has for the first time quantified in an area outside a protected forest a phenomenon that biologists and rural folk have long observed across the country - dogs have emerged a primary prey for leopards.
The scientists at the Centre for Wildlife Studies, Bangalore, and other institutions who analysed leopard scat samples in an agricultural landscape of western Maharashtra have found that domestic animals made up 87 per cent of prey consumed by leopards. The digestive system does not break down hair. The researchers analysed patterns of hair residues found in the leopards' scat samples to measure the prey proportions.
Dogs appeared to be the leopards' primary target, accounting for about 39 per cent of the prey biomass, followed by cows (14 per cent), cats (12 per cent) and goats (11 per cent). The study's findings have been accepted for publication in the journal Fauna and Flora International, Oryx.
"Rural folk and biologists have known this a long time, but many, especially urban people, still think wild animals should consume only wild things," said Vidya Athreya, a biologist who has been studying leopards across the country for the past 12 years.
The study by Athreya and her colleagues suggests that in their study area in Ahmednagar district, the estimated canine density and the prey-predator relationship between leopards and dogs could support up to a 10 times higher leopard population.
The findings suggest that controlling the canine population could help reduce incursions by leopards into towns and cities. "The density of any organism in an area depends on food available - for unowned dogs, garbage is probably the primary source of food," Athreya said.
"If we clean up the way garbage is disposed, animals that rely on garbage such as feral dogs, pigs, rats are likely to drop in numbers and the incidence of leopard incursions into towns is also likely to reduce," she said.
While leopards have long lived in rural areas carrying away livestock and dogs, they have also been spotted in several cities, including Guwahati, Gurgaon, Mumbai, Nashik and Shimla, over the past five years.
"We need to accept their presence, instead of thinking of them as 'straying' because that way we will equip ourselves better to deal with them so that problems to us humans are minimised," Athreya said.
The scientists did find several wild species, including bandicoot rats, small Indian civets, macaques, mongoose and birds in the leopards' diet. But each of these species accounted for less than three per cent of the prey biomass in the scat samples analysed.
An analysis of the populations of domestic animals within the study area and the biomass of prey detected in the scat samples does not show a correlation. While livestock numbers were much higher than the numbers of dogs and cats, the leopards consumed dogs and cats much more than livestock.
"This is possibly because most livestock are protected well," Athreya said. "And dogs and cats are easier for leopards to catch."