Wild animals can be incredibly dangerous, this we all know.
There may be plenty of heartwarming tales and viral stories of how sweet and wonderful they can be, but in the end they are highly dangerous creatures.
Often you will notice that this is something we already know instinctively, and really it should be something that we keep in our conscious mind.
This is especially so for our own sake, and for the sake of our children, who often don’t know better.
This recent piece of news highlights just exactly how vulnerable children can be in that department.
A 3-year-old Indian boy, who was later identified as Wasim Akram, was found headless on the 18th of December.
Local officials would later report that a leopard had snuck into the house while the boy was at home with his mother.
The wild creature had pounced on the hapless toddler and dragged the child away into the woods.
The headless body was later handed back to the boy’s parents.
It is strongly suspected that this same leopard is also responsible for another two more killings that had been reported within the last two months, with one of the victims being an 8-year-old boy.
The news agency that covered the story on the 7th of Dec reported that the boy had been mauled to death.
As of now, action has been taken to curb the situation.
This has been done in the form of arming wildlife officials with tranquilizer guns, who have taken to searching the area to hunt down the problematic leopard.
A statement by a regional wildlife warden suggests that capturing the beast is proving to be a tough challenge, as it was spotted but the officials were unable to trap it.
In the meantime, the local officials working in the states of Kashmir and Jammu, which are located in the north, have demanded that the state government put out “elimination orders” to take out the leopard.
The demand is understandable.
Leopards are endangered creatures, with their remaining numbers estimated to be about 12,000 to 14,000.
However, as the country continues further development, human habitation continues to encroach in on what was previously solely leopard territory, making encounters between man and beast more common.
This has come at the price of some highly detrimental results, as can be seen in the increasing number of leopard-related deaths across the country.
Other deaths that have been recently reported include one of a Buddhist monk.
In the western state of Maharashtra, a Buddhist monk had been meditating in a forest when they were attacked and killed by a wild leopard.
This, unfortunately, is not the first attack of its kind in the area, but rather the fifth reported case, according to the news reporting agency AFP.
While experts do not have the exact numbers on just how many humans are killed by leopards every year, it is estimated that the cases number in the hundreds.
Considering just how disastrous this is, hopefully the state and nation’s governments will be able to quickly come up with a plan for handling this horrible situation.
SEE ALSO: Man Pokes A Leopard With A Stick, Then The Cage Opens And Leopard Gets Its Revenge (Video)