Uri, Indian-administered Kashmir – Parveena Ganai, 45, remembers the day a leopard killed her 14-year-old son Shahid Ahmad, his body later found in pieces near their village of Turkaanjan in Indian-administered Kashmir’s remote Baramulla district.
It was a bright Sunday morning on June 12 – a school holiday for the teenager. He had his haircut, took a shower, ironed his school uniform, and organized his books for tomorrow.
In the afternoon, he and his younger brother took his family’s cows to graze in the nearby forest. Shahid Ahmad never came back.
“This was routine work for them. A leopard grabbed Shahid in his jaws as soon as they reached the forest. His brother is shocked and still remembers Shahid’s last scream,” Ganai told Al Jazeera at her home perched on a hill in the village some 100km (62 miles) away from the Himalayan region’s main city of Srinagar.
Shakir Ahmad, who was with his elder brother at the time, says he saw Shahid in the leopard’s mouth, screaming, as he stood there frozen.
“Fear overwhelmed me. I thought the leopard will kill me too,” the 12-year-old told Al Jazeera. “I thought if I am killed, our family will not even find our bones. I came running home.”
Ganai stated that Shakir was in distress since the death of his brother.
Child victims
When the villagers came to know about the incident, hundreds of them rushed to the forest to locate the teenager’s body and were soon joined by wildlife and police officials.
“We started in the afternoon and searched for the body till 2am,” Ganai said.
At dawn, Shahid’s mauled body was located under the bushes.
“His head was separated from his body. They were in two different places. He might have tried to resist with his other hand, but one arm was missing. It was devastating to search for the body parts,” Ganai said, sobbing.
“We never heard of or witnessed such incidents here before. If we had any idea, we would have never let our children go with the cows,” she said.
Two days later, a leopard took a six year-old girl who was walking through the village, 5km (3.2 mile) away.
“It happened right in front of my eyes and in a matter of seconds,” the girl’s mother Haleema Begum told Al Jazeera at their house in Batangi village.
After an hour-long search, the girl’s body was located by the villagers in a forest three kilometres (two miles) away. “At the end, I was just praying for her body so that I could have a grave to visit,” Haleema said.
Amir Muneer (12 years old), a Cholan Kalsi Ghati resident, was the third child to be killed in the same area that week.
Many of the victims of leopard attacks on the Himalayan area are young children, who are often caught unawares and unable defend themselves.
On July 6, four-year-old Mehraz Azad was dragged from his uncle’s courtyard by a leopard half a mile into the woods in Rajwar village in the northern Kupwara district.
Villagers found the boy within 30 minutes. However, he was severely injured with deep cuts to his body and face. He died in hospital later.
In the same district’s Monabal Haril village, another four-year-old boy, Saqib-din-badana, died after he was attacked by a leopard on July 31.
A leopard attacked a toddler who stepped out of Wagoora village’s Wagoora home on August 8. His injuries proved fatal even though he was quickly rescued.
Conflict between humans and wildlife
In 2006, the local government began keeping records of human-wildlife disputes. According to government figures, at least 230 people died and 2800 were injured since then.
In the valley, 12 people were killed and 31 were wounded between 2021-2022. This sparked panic and anger from residents.
According to government figures, forests in Indian-administered Kashmir decreased by at most 420 sq km (162 miles) between 2015 & 2019, due to infrastructure projects, timber smuggling and rising housing demand.
As a result, more wild animals are seen in areas with human habitations, leading to a deadly conflict that studies say is increasing “at an alarming rate”. Experts warn against human settlements invading animal habitats.
Kashmiri villagers claim that black bears are moving out of the forest areas to become residential areas.
While emergency control rooms are being set up by the authorities in some instances, locals have sometimes taken matters into their hands and fought the animals with an intent to kill them.
Last year, a report by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) said the conflict between humans and wild animals is one of the main threats to the long-term survival of some of the world’s most important species.
It said India will be the most affected by the human-wildlife conflict “because it had the world’s second-largest human population as well as large populations of tigers, Asian elephants, one-horned rhinos, and Asiatic lions and other species”.
Villagers in India-administered Kashmir are left in a state of panic because of the looming threat of an intensifying human-wildlife conflict.
“Earlier, there used to be a buffer zone between the forests and the human habitation but now all that has vanished,” Rashid Yahya Naqash, the region’s wildlife warden, told Al Jazeera.
Naqash said one of the reasons for the rise in human-wildlife conflicts is “poor urbanisation planning which does not take care of the fragile surrounding ecology”.
“In the last 40 years especially, human settlements have taken place near forests and this is the repercussion of it.”
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