The four-year-old beast nicknamed Sachin finally returned to its enclosure in the park late Friday, after a days’ long hunt. “Sachin had been raised in captivity and could not hunt to feed itself,” Vinod Kumar Yarad of the West Bengal Zoo Authority told AFP. “We kept a large chunk of meat inside the leopard’s enclosure with its gate left open. Leopards in captivity may live to up to 23 years as compared to just 17 years in the wild. An estimated 431 leopards were killed in 2017, according to government figures, most by poachers for their hides and other body parts.

Source: The Guardian January 05, 2019 12:22 UTC