A male leopard was found dead on the top of an electric pole at a farmland in Mallaram village, 18 kilometres from Nizamabad, in Telangana on Monday morning.
The leopard appeared to have been caught in electrical cables and got electrocuted sometime during Sunday night.
Though forest officials in Nizamabad admitted that there were sightings of the wild cat in areas surrounding the forest, they ruled out the hand of poachers in the incident.
“Leopards can drag their kill to the treetop, but it surprises us that the animal had climbed such a tall electrical poll,” Prasad, a forest department staff, told local media.
Villagers’ hand
“Irate villagers could have killed the animal and hung it on the poll, but even that seems impossible (due to the possibility of electrocution),” he said.
Forest officials took the help of the local electricity department to bring down the dead cat and sent it for post-mortem.
They said the cause of death could only be known after the post-mortem.
Residents of Mallaram, however, maintain silence over the death of the wild cat.
None of them, in fact, came forward with information on sighting the leopard on Sunday. In July 2016, a partially decomposed carcass of a female leopard and her cub were found in Tenagadapa reserve forest near Abbugudem village in Khammam district.
A post-mortem of the carcasses later revealed that the animals were poisoned.
The carcasses were then sent to the Laboratory for Conservation of Endangered Species (LaCONES) and Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) here for post-mortem.
One of the paws of the leopard had also been sawed off allegedly by poachers.