THE LEOPARD 
amount of earth and grass. They then eat the tit -bits, kidneys and kidney 
fat, heart, and liver, brisket and parts of the head, such as the ears and 
nose. Later they eat the solid meat, which they tear off in large pieces 
with the skin attached. They will return again and again to the carcass 
of an animal they have killed until there is nothing left. Leopards 
undoubtedly like to kill their own meat, probably for the sake of the warm 
blood, but when hungry they do not disdain carrion. I once shot a leopard 
as it was tearing away at the foot of a dead rhinoceros which had been 
killed several days previously, and from the bones of which the vultures 
had already picked every atom of flesh. As with their Indian relatives, 
African leopards are very partial to dogs, which they will often carry off 
in the boldest possible manner from the very feet of their masters. A 
dog of mine was once seized by the neck by a leopard and carried off from 
my camp. Two days later it returned looking very crestfallen, and with 
four holes through the skin of the back of the neck. When the leopard 
seized it, the loose skin must have slipped up so that the dog was carried 
off by the scruff of the neck, and uninjured except for the tooth -holes 
through its skin. I imagine that after having carried it some distance, the 
leopard released its hold in order to give it a bite that would kill it, and 
that immediately it was dropped the dog dashed off and escaped. But the 
curious thing is that the dog was so terrified that, instead of returning at 
once to camp, it rushed away into the wilderness, and must have lain 
hidden in the bush for two nights and a day before venturing to come 
home. Though they are rare, cases of leopards killing and eating human 
beings — usually women — sometimes occur. Such a case came within my 
own knowledge when I was hunting on the Chobi River in 1879; and when 
I was at Meru on the slopes of Mount Kenia, in British East Africa, the year 
before last (1912), the Commissioner for the Meru Province, Mr E. B. 
Horne, told me that quite recently several women had been carried off in 
the daytime by man-eating leopards whilst working in their fields. 
I think that, as a rule, female leopards usually give birth to three cubs 
at a litter; but, as with lions, there would appear to be great mortality 
among young leopard cubs, as more than one of a litter seldom seems to 
reach maturity. As with lions, too, leopard cubs live with their mothers 
until they stand nearly as high at the shoulder as their parent, when they 
are probably approaching two years of age; and between the birth of one 
litter of cubs and the time when the survivor or survivors amongst these 
go out into the world to fend for themselves, the mother never produces 
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