"In Telangana/Hyderabad there is one subcaste of people who eat cats"

In Telangana/Hyderabad there is one subcaste of people who eat cats. Worst thing is they steal pet cats from neighbourhood and eat them. I've lost 2 cats so far.

The tweet below is a response to the tweet about a domestic cat seeing off a cobra. I don't believe the cat is truly confronting the cobra. But the response is interesting in that it states that some people in Hyderabad which is in the mid-south of India steal domestic cats for food. 

Location of Hyderabad, India.

And the guy who made the tweet has lost 2 of his cats this way. It is cat meat in India. I have written about this before. Who would have a cat in Hyderabad if people steal and eat them? I guess you'd have to keep them inside all the time but that is probably impractical. A subcaste is a subdivision of a caste. A caste is one of the traditional social classes into which people are divided in a Hindu society.

Note: Tweets sometimes die. If that has happened, I am sorry but I can't control it.

In Telangana/Hyderabad there is one sub craste of people who eat cats.
Worst thing is they steal pet cats from neighbourhood and eat them. I've lost 2 cats so far.

— Lemur Kan Ki (@yeshurog) July 22, 2021

Brothers throw birthday cake at chasing leopard to scare it away

INDIA-NEWS AND COMMENT: Two brothers, Firoz and Sabir Mansuri, were on their motorbike heading towards a birthday party for Firoz's son in Madhya Pradesh when a leopard came out of a sugarcane field and tried to attack them. Firoz was the driver while Sabir was the pillion passenger carrying the cake. He said that when times are desperate you do what you can to survive and what occurred to him was to throw the cake at the leopard who was following them for over 500 m. It did the trick.

 Brothers throw birthday cake at chasing leopard to scare it away

The cake hit the leopard, distracting it and it disappeared back into the fields whence it had come. Comment: leopards not infrequently come into conflict with people in India because of the large number of people in India and there are quite a few leopards as well. We are told that leopard numbers in India have grown by more than 60% between 2014 and 2018 to almost 13,000. I'm surprised to read this but even without this growth in numbers you will notice on the Internet that there is a lot of leopard-human conflict in India. Leopards tend to go into urban environments where they are attacked by a mob of men normally. It is not nice to see to be honest.

And I believe that you get testosterone fuelled men wanting to show off so they have a go at single-handedly attacking the leopard. Not all leopards are large and highly dangerous. Female leopards or sub-adult leopards can be quite small in comparison to what people think they are.

Although, Sabir said that they escaped death with their birthday cake. I'm not sure that they would have been killed by this leopard. There have been man-eating leopards in the past, back in the old days when there were "white hunters" tracking maneaters but they are rare nowadays. Or at least the Indian news media does not tell us much about these attacks.

Normally, we read about leopards falling into wells and kind people extracting the animal from the well with great difficulty. They then release the leopard back into the wild. Leopards are the fourth largest cat after the jaguar, lion and tiger. They are similar in size to the mountain lion.

Conflict with humans

In 2002, Mel and Fiona Sunquist reported about the conflict between leopards and humans in their book Wild Cats of the World. They say that conflicts exist in many different ways but most commonly in the form of leopards killing domestic stock. Whenever leopards live close to humans, they end up attacking and killing livestock such as sheep, goats and other livestock. They also attack and kill dogs in quite large numbers. Occasionally they kill people. In April 1989 the newspaper Rising Nepal said that "local people had stoned to death a leopard which had killed a man collecting wood in the forest in western Nepal."

Genuine man-eating leopards i.e. those who are habituated to killing people are rare as mentioned. Man-eating leopards are much rarer than man eating tigers. Because leopards are bold and stealthy, once they have a taste for human blood, they can be formidable and claim a large number of victims.

Some citizens of India fear man-eating leopards more than tigers partly because leopards are bold enough to break into their homes to kill their victims inside. One famous maneater, the Leopard of Rudraprayag, killed 125 people. The hunter turned conservationist Jim Corbett who has a park named after him, was called upon to hunt down the Panar leopard which was credited with having killed 400 people! Despite man eating leopards being hard to track and kill, he was successful.

Cats must have negative Covid test before entering India

The Indian government has made it mandatory for members of the cat family to have a negative test for Covid before they are allowed into the country. This includes domestic cats to the big cats, in fact any cat! The new rules also include gorillas. The objective is obvious, namely to try and minimise the spread of the disease in the country. It is the first of its kind. 

It's an interesting rule because the experts have consistently stated that there is no evidence that cats transmit the disease to people despite the fact that that it is a zoonotic disease. Zoonotic diseases are those that can be transmitted between humans and animals and vice versa.

Cats must have negative Covid test before entering India

So, I guess this rule has been enacted out of an abundance of caution, as the politicians say. The government states that large cats and gorillas are "having high susceptibility of infection against natural Covid-19 infection". The information for this they say comes from the World Animal Health Organisation Technical Fact Sheet.

The rule will be in place until the pandemic has ended. The negative test must be no older than three days. The world knows that India is going through a surge in infections for Covid. Their reported rate of infection and deaths are highly misleading. They are heavily underreported. The families of people who die of Covid do not report the matter. These people are not taken to hospital. There is no record of them dying. They are burnt on funeral pyres. We see them in car parks.

It is entirely wrong for the news media to list comparisons of infections and deaths on a country-by-country basis because each country reports this data differently. If there was a uniform reporting system you can compare the data but this is not the case.

The UK, for example, states that if anybody dies within 28 days of getting Covid their death certificate states that they died of Covid! There is no other country on the planet that is so generous in his assessment of death by Covid! And yet the UK is constantly criticised the high death rates. I'm digressing.

Big cats and zoos have been known to get Covid from their zookeepers. Domestic cats and dogs have contracted Covid but we don't know the numbers but they are very low. It is a minor issue in controlling the virus. Although some scientists believe that animals may become a reservoir for the virus when it has been quelled by social distancing and vaccinations.

I would expect further action to take place both in India and in other countries with respect to how we deal with zoo and companion animals. There is a call for vaccinating animals against the virus and in Russia they do have a vaccination for that purpose. But can we trust Russian vaccinations? Russian citizens do not trust their own vaccine which is why they have an incredibly poor rate of take-up of inoculations against the virus in Russia. I'm digressing again!