Killer Leopard

The Leopard of Rudraprayag was a male leopard, known to have killed over 125 people. It was eventually killed by hunter and author Jim Corbett. The first leopard victim was from the village of Benji and was killed in 1918. During the next 8 years, people were in dire fear of venturing alone during the night on the road between the Hindu shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath as it passed through the territory of the Leopard. And few residents left their homes after dark either. The leopard, preferring human flesh, would break down doors, break through windows, scratch in the mud or cover walls of huts and drag the occupants out of them with its claws before devouring them. According to official records, the leopard killed more than 125 people. However, Corbett implies that the death toll was probably higher due to some of the deaths that were NOT reported and also people who died from bleeding or any loss of blood after the attack and not exactly at the time of the attack. Units of Gurkha soldiers and British soldiers were sent to track him down, but each time they failed. Attempts to kill the leopard with high potency gin and poison traps also failed. Several well-known hunters tried to capture the leopard with the British government offering financial rewards. They would just fail like the rest. On July 2, 1925, Jim Corbett tried to kill the leopard and, after 10 weeks of hunting, finally got the one killed on May 2, 1926. Corbett's notes revealed that this leopard, a leopard in addition to being male, was also "quite old " in matters of age he was in good condition, except for some wounds that were already healed but traumatically suffered on him by hunters after he just became a man eater. The leopard started hunting people eight years earlier, when he was still young; therefore, it was not old age that led him to hunt people. Corbett wrote that in his opinion human bodies that were not buried during disease epidemics were the main reason for the Rudraprayag and Panar leopards becoming man-eaters. At the end of the introduction to his well-known book Man-Eaters of Kumaon, Corbett wrote...
"A leopard, in an area in which its natural food is scarce, finds these bodies soon acquiring a taste for human flesh, and when the disease dies and normal conditions are established, it naturally, on finding its food supply cut off (scarce ; as already stated), leads to the killing of human beings. Of the two man-eating leopards of Kumaon, which between them killed more than five hundred and twenty-five human beings: one followed in the footsteps of a very severe outbreak of cholera, while the other it followed the mysterious illness that swept India in 1918, which at the time was called war fever. Today, we know it was obviously the well-known Spanish flu."
In Rudraprayag, there is a plaque that marks the spot where the leopard was shot. There is a fair held in Rudraprayag commemorating the death of the leopard. The leopard was the subject of a 2005 BBC Two TV Series hunt in the Rudraprayag episode The Man Eating Leopard which features an entirely fictionalized depiction of the hunt by Jim Corbett. The official record lists 125 people killed by the leopard.