Leopard cheated death to find a love twice his age

CHHATBIR ZOO (MOHALI): DLF Group chairman and real estate magnate K P Singh recently warmed the hearts of those battling age and receding hopes by revealing that at 91 he had found a new, much younger love, Sheena, after the death of his wife, Indra, following 65 years of companionship.
At Chhatbir zoo, in an inversion of that romance of the inverted ages, a male leopard, 'Taari' (6 years old), rescued and restored to health miraculously after he got trapped in a poacher's notorious clutch-wire snare, has fallen for the charms of a female leopard, Bijli, twice his age!
Given names by the zoo keepers, the male takes his name, Taari, after the wire he battled and 'Bijli' for her lightning reflexes. Only zoo keepers know how difficult it is to indulge in match-making for captive big cats. They can tear each other to pieces if signs of compatibility are not discerned by zoo keepers before they are brought together.
But Bijli is reputed in the zoo as a very accommodating female, who in 2015 had accepted another captive leopard, ‘Papoo’, and delivered two adorable, blue-eyed cubs in 2015. Bijli’s cubs had come after a gap of 14 years to the leopard community at Chhatbir.
Now, the experienced female has embraced the war wounded hero, Taari, with all her passion and charms that include a pair of alluring amber eyes. “We introduce big cats to each other very cautiously by keeping a distance between them in their respective cages.
The distance is reduced when we find they are making the right noises and gestures, and are not snarling at each other. In the case of Taari and Bijli, we found that they would eat meat in their respective cages while looking into each other’s eyes, just as a family at the dinner table.
They would make purring sounds and curious gestures with the movement of their whiskers when their cages were placed adjacent. Their zoo keeper, Jasvir Singh Gogaa, realised they were literally made for each other and they were then given a cage to share,” range forest officer, animal management division, Gagan Kataria, told TOI.
But Bijli would never have met Taari had he not shown an indomitable will to live and the zoo team combined the best of eastern and western cures. In fact, the zoo management and veterinary teams carried out one the most successful of captive animal treatments in recent years on Taari.
The male leopard’s tale is one of battling the most forbidding of odds, snatching life from the proverbial jaws of death, and, above all, a story of hope shines eternally, life’s restoration and love found.
“Taari came to us from Anandpur Sahib with the snare embedded an inch deep around his body and into his abdomen. Part of his viscera had come out. He had lost a couple of canines in the struggle to break free, was severely traumatised and his jaw lining had ‘sloughed’ and was full of ‘pus’.
It took us 75 days of daily treatment to save a virtually impossible medical case. The biggest challenge we faced was that we could not tranquilise him every day and we had to use a squeeze cage. But that cage would result in the stitches opening up leading to a regression of his treatment.
Then, after consultation, we tried out an imported antiseptic dressing, Repiderma spray, which was single use and worked for 15-20 days. That solved most of our problems at one go,” senior veterinarian Dr Ashish Kumar told TOI. It was now time for traditional remedies of the east to step in.
Taari got liberal doses of “Haldi dusting” (tumeric powder) from the veterinary team, to the extent that his cage was sprinkled with the dark golden powder across the floor and it seemed as if playing Holi was a daily affair for the dashing leopard! Haldi’s antiseptic and anti-allergic qualities worked wonders to heal Taari’s gaping wounds.
His zoo keeper, Gogaa, succeeded in befriending the traumatised leopard who would otherwise lunge hard at the sight of any “hated human”. Gogaa, who understands leopard behaviour like a mother her child, won Taari's trust and was able to administer the daily medical applications without much bluff and bluster on Taari's part.
“That said, all our best efforts would have gone in vain had not Taari displayed an amazing grit, a supernatural will to live. It was the strength of his individual character. Other leopard specimens in similar circumstances might not have battled the injuries so hard as Taari. His recovery is a tribute to his determination,” Dr Kumar said.