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MAN-EATING PANTHERS. 



By J. D. Inverarity. 



[Mead before the Bombay Natural History Society on 10th July, 1894.) 



In the hot weather of 1894, I was shooting in the northern part 

 of the Hyderabad country, and spent a great deal of my time in trying 

 to secure a man-eating panther that I was informed had already killed 

 21 people. From what afterwards occurred I believe there must 

 have been two panthers addicted to man-eating, but at first I thought 

 there was only one. I arrived at a village called Tutra on April 25th. 

 Here several persons had been killed, and I was told that the panther was 

 in the habit of sneaking into the villages at night and seizing some one 

 asleep by the throat. There were several villages he had killed in, occu- 

 pying, roughly speaking, a diameter of seven miles. I had not long to 

 wait for a kill, as on the morning of April 27th news was brought of a 

 man killed in the village of Karwa, two miles off, the previous night. 

 I rode there at once, and found the corpse of a fine big man, with the 

 holes made by the panther's teeth in his throat and claw-marks on the 

 chest and legs. This village consisted of about a dozen huts. The man 

 had been lying asleep on a cot, his wife on another cot by his side, in 

 the small open space in front of his hut enclosed by a thorn fence. 

 The hut was the centre one of the village. I found the tracks of the 

 panther; he had crossed the fields, gone up the village pathway, entered 

 by the gate which had not been properly closed, and sprung on the 

 man as he lay asleep. He had been frightened off by the shouts 

 of the villagers. He bolted back up the path he had come and made 

 across the fields to the jungles where I lost his tracks. The general 

 character of the jungle, in the neighbourhood of the villages frequented 

 by the panther, was flat, intersected at long distances by shallow nullahs. 

 A great portion of the jungle was bare, other portions had grass about 

 waist-high — a most unpromising place to find a panther in, as he 

 might be in any of the grass patches over an area of miles. On this 

 occasion I tried a couple of beats in the nullahs near the village 

 without success. Subsequently I used to walk the grass patches, but 

 it was like looking for a needle in a bundle of hay. The panther 

 tracks were not found by me in the nullahs. I believe it must have 

 usually lain up in the flat jungle somewhere in the grass. 

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