“Go to sleep or the tiger will come and eat you!”

In our childhoods we have heard this threat repeatedly. Whenever we dared to do the mistake of staying up on a school night, our mothers used this persuasion tactic of fear to convince us to go to sleep. We were taught that animals like tiger, cheetahs and leopards were scary and to be afraid of. We were terrorized with the story of the ‘man-eating’ animal and had been conditioned to be fearful of these big cats.

The leopard in the popular threat is gruesome, scary and ruthless, while the leopard of reality is the defensive, scared and unprotected.

Mumbai, the sprawling metropolis on India’s west coast, is home to over 20 million people—and around 35 leopards. The whole of Mumbai metropolitan region covers an area of 4,355 sq. km. And is the most densely populated metro city in the country. A tussle between natural wildlife and humans is inevitable, but is it fair?

The media hasn’t helped in any way to reduce the misconceptions that build up the people's minds, and instead adds to it by broadcasting headlines like “man eater attacks a biker” and “khunkhar tendue ne kiya hamla”! Even today, these myths are propagated more and more for the purpose of selling sensational news. Then how do we uncover the truth?

The truth is that, leopards attack when they are provoked. They are as scared, if not more, as humans, and want to prevent themselves from harm's way. They also venture upon humans when they mistake them for animals. Krishna Tiwari, a wildlife researcher conservationist states that leopards usually eat spotted deer but due to the wide-spread encroachments, they have been forced to feed upon other smaller preys like dogs, cats, goats and rodents. A leopard requires 10-15 sq kms of land with availability of prey, water and shelter to survive comfortable. However, in this situation, a good number of leopards are staying in a small stretch of land, and are unable to move to other areas, which they ideally would have done, due to the park being surrounded by development on all sides. They avoid confrontation, do not understand man-made boundaries and are innocent victims in this situation.

We must remember that the leopards were here long before the millions of people turned Mumbai into a bustling megacity. There were once a sizeable population of tigers in the city too, but the SNGP's peripheral have never been as densely populated as they are now, and many conservationists believe that this is the reason for the increased sightings.

According to Nikit Surve's research, the leopard-attack situation has been heightened since the 2000s. Very recently, in January 2016, a boy in Aarey Milk Colony witnessed a leopard walking with a puppy in his mouth. In another incidence in January 2016, a man spoke about seeing a female leopard with her cubs in their backyard every alternate evening. (However it must be noted that the leopard never attacked the humans partly because the humans never attacked the leopards). In February 2016, a 43-year-old woman was attacked by a leopard when she went out to relieve herself. There have been several such incidences where the leopard is very easily blamed and named as the culprit.

In all the fable tales that children hear, we have seen the big cats as the villains. This has created a psychological impact on the mindset of the growing children and instilled fear in them. However, there is need for a revolutionary change in the thinking of the people. What we, as reporters and media personnels say about such incidences, and the way we speak the truth of the incidence will not only gradually change this angle of the man-eating aadam-khor animal and make him into an equal inhabitant of this earth. After all, it is their lands as much as it is ours, and let us not forget that we took over their land, the land of the innocent defenceless animals and called it our own. Now it’s up to you to decide: are they encroaching our lands or are we encroaching their lives?