'First we thought it was a dog': Chilling moment leopard 'joins' Bengaluru couple over coffee

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The Bengaluru Urban Forest division officials on Thursday rescued a leopard that had strayed into a house in Jigani town in South Bengaluru after a 5-hour-long operation. The officials used a mobile phone strapped to a stick, inserting it through a ventilation window for a video call view of the house interior.

The incident took place at Kuntlu Reddy Layout, where Venkatesh, his wife Venkatalakshmi, and their son Nikhil live in a rented home. The couple had a close encounter with the leopard, estimated to be six or seven years old, while they were having coffee and watching TV at around 7 am on Thursday. The big cat entered their ground-floor home, casually walking behind them before entering a room. The couple immediately fled the house and locked the door from the outside, unharmed.

“We initially thought it was a dog. It started moving towards the bedroom. My wife wanted to scare the animal out when she saw the spotted tail and realised it was a leopard...then we ran out of the house,” Venkatesh told forest department officials.

The local residents alerted forest officials at around 7.30 am. "When locals alerted us, we were shocked as the area does not have any green cover within a 2km radius," V Ganesh, assistant conservator of forests, Bengaluru South subdivision told TOI.

The officials reached at the spot in less than half an hour along with Leopard Task Force. "It was a tough task to locate the cat inside the 1 BHK house, surrounded by buildings all around. Rushing inside without knowing where the leopard was holed up was not an option," the official said.

The situation became more challenging as over 2,000 people gathered on rooftops to see the big cat. The officials made a sketch of the house and swung into action.

To locate the animal, officials used a mobile phone strapped to a stick, inserting it through a ventilation window for a video call view of the interior. "With time running out and cloudy conditions making it worse with hardly any light, we strapped mobile phone to a stick and inserted it into the house through a ventilation window. We were constantly scouting for the leopard via video call. After half an hour of search, we spotted its eyes underneath the cot in a corner of the room," Ganesh explained.

Darting the leopard with a sedative was even more challenging due to the risk of causing panic among the crowd outside. "Any wrong move could have hurt the cat, which was frightened and under stress. We could not chase it out and rescue with nets as thousands of people had gathered outside, and the leopard could have jumped on anybody in panic," Ganesh explained.

"We used reversible sedative Ketamine drug and took a shot at the leopard from a narrow opening. Luckily, it got stuck, and the leopard slept without any movements. After a few minutes, we entered the room and rescued the cat around 12.30pm," another official explained.