New Delhi:
Two brothers pulled off a sweet escape from a leopard in Madhya Pradesh by throwing a birthday cake at the animal as it chased them although they rode a motorbike, officials mentioned Thursday.
“Your first instinct when you sense danger is to do whatever you can to save yourself. That’s what they did,” a forest official told AFP.
“They had a cake with them and they threw it at the leopard.”
According to the Times of India, Firoz and Sabir Mansuri have been heading at dusk to a birthday party for Firoz’s son in Madhya Pradesh’s Burhanpur when the leopard burst out of a sugarcane field.
They accelerated but the major cat gained on them on the muddy path, leaving Sabir, riding pillion, no other alternative than to lob the box containing the cake at the predator.
Hit by the “weapon of sweet distraction”, the flummoxed feline gave up its chase and darted back into the fields — and devoid of even attempting the cake, the paper mentioned.
“The leopard followed us for over 500 metres (yards). We narrowly escaped death,” it quoted Sabir as saying.
Leopard numbers in India grew more than 60 % in between 2014 and 2018 to virtually 13,000, according to the government, with the highest numbers in Madhya Pradesh.
They are significantly less scared than tigers of persons and frequently enter villages and even towns.
Attacks on adults are uncommon but children are more at danger. Last month a leopard snatched a 4-year-old girl from her garden in Kashmir. Her mutilated body was located the next day.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by The Spuzz employees and is published from a syndicated feed.)