MISCELLANEOUS NOTES. 13ia 



No. II.— CANNIBALISM AMONG PANTHERS {FELIS PARDU8). 



About a week ago I had three panthers, said to be a large male, a female 

 and a small male, marked down in some dense thorn jungle chiefly can- 

 delabra cactus and babul not many miles from Veraval. 



The jungle was far too close to beat, so I tied up a live goat and sat over 

 it in a machan about 6 P.M. A medium sized male panther came at 6-30 

 and I hit him hard with a 500 express bullet. He turned and jumped 

 back into cover, and, on examining the spot, I found a piece of lung on a 

 stone, and a thick trail of light- coloured frothy blood leading into the thick 

 thorn jungle. I knew then that he was hit through the lungs and could 

 not go far, so I decided, as the cover was so thick, to leave him till next 

 morning. In the morning I found him lying about 50 yards away the 

 other side of a thick clump of cactus through which he had dragged him- 

 self. Imagine my disgust to find that he had been more than half eaten 

 and the skin of course ruined. The head, chest and forelegs, hindlegs, tail 

 and part of the rump were untouched, the rest of him was eaten, the ribs 

 bitten off close to the spine. 



All round were the footmarks of the female and the small male, so there 

 is no doubt that they had made a square meal of their dead relation. 

 There were no signs of jackals or hyenas. The dead panther had very 

 large pads, and this accounted for his being described as a large male 

 though as a fact he was only a medium size. 



I remember reading of a similar case in a previous note in our Journal, 

 but I believe such cases to be sufficiently rare to make this one worth 

 noting. 



J. R. CARTER, Major, 



Bombay Political Department. 



Camp Veraval, 

 7 th June 1912. 



[ Cases of this kind have already been recorded both amongst tigers and panthers 

 in Vol VI. and XVlI of this Journal.— Eds. ] 



No. III.— NUMBER OF A PANTHER'S {FELIS PARDUS) CAUDAL 



VERTEBRA. 



In my notes in the last number of the Journal on Mr. Hick's book '^ Forty 

 years among the wild animals of India " I referred to his statement that 

 two species of panther are distinguishable, among other differences, 

 by the ' fact' that the large ' species' has only 22 vertebrae in the tail while 



