Jake Wallis Simons reviews Leopards: 21st Century Cats on BBC One, and discovers what causes the animals to 'go rogue'.
A leopard at the Junnar Wildlife SOS rescue centre in India Photo: Icon Films/Laura Coates
Did you know that there are around 14,000 big cats living in India today,
often within metres of humans? Did you know that Mumbai
is infested with them? And did you know that in some districts they
are afraid of humans, while in others they have mysteriously become
man-eaters?
If the answer to the above is no, you must have missed Leopards: 21st
Century Cats (Friday, BBC Two). I didn’t. I was gripped.
The presenter, the wonderfully named Romulus Whitaker, one of India’s leading
conservationists, kicked things off by relating the tale of how his dog was
dragged off and killed by a leopard at his home in southern India. From
there he went on the hunt, travelling across India to try to work out why
some leopards turn bad.
At one point, he tested the tameness of a leopard by advancing, unarmed and in
full view, until he was within metres of the animal. Stick that in your pipe
and smoke it, Attenborough.
The final 20 minutes of the documentary had rather too much Blair Witch
nightscope footage for my liking. And at times it was rather hammy, what
with the overblown accounts of leopard encounters and repeated shots of the
clouds passing in front of the moon. Romulus’s conclusion, however – that
leopards go rogue when they are “messed with” by man, and that with a bit
more tolerance, inter-species coexistence is possible – was compelling.
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