Mumbai residents can likely thank leopards for reducing the number of potential rabies cases and perhaps even saving lives according to a paper publishing in the Ecological Society of America Journal last week. Researchers suggest that leopards roaming the nearby Sanjay Gandhi National Park hunt and kill dogs in and around villages; enough so that dogs make up about 40 percent of their diets. About 95,000 dog live in Mumbai, India’s largest city. Researchers wanted to learn more about the relationships the leopards have with the dogs.
Source: Quartz, March 9, 2018.
It was at that point we wondered whether leopards help to protect people from dog bites by keeping the dog population down – especially around the park where their diet is dominated by dogs.
Surveys performed . . . suggest that the answer is yes. Dog densities there are lower and, according to our analyses, citizens might experience only 11% of the bites compared with people who live further from the park.
INSIGHTS: The study further estimates what might happen if the leopards weren’t consuming a small portion of Mumbai’s dogs. The number of rabies cases and dog control costs would rise. The authors recommend that we think of large predators as ones that can be beneficial to farmers, ecosystems and insurance companies.