New Delhi: Two brothers pulled off an escape from a leopard in Madhya Pradesh by throwing a birthday cake at the animal as it chased them while they rode a motorbike, officials said on Thursday.
“Your first instinct when you sense danger is to do whatever you can to save yourself. That’s what they did. They had a cake with them and they threw it at the leopard,” a forest official told AFP.
According to The Times of India, Firoz and Sabir Mansuri were heading at dusk to a birthday party for Firoz’s son in Madhya Pradesh’s Burhanpur when the leopard burst out of a sugarcane field.
They accelerated but the big cat gained on them on the muddy path, leaving Sabir, riding pillion, no other option than to lob the box containing the cake at the predator.
Hit by the “sweet weapon”, the flummoxed leopard gave up the chase and darted back into the fields. It didn’t even stop to eat the cake.
“The leopard followed us for over 500 metres. We narrowly escaped death,” the paper quoted Sabir as saying.
According to the government, leopard numbers in India grew more than 60 per cent between 2014 and 2018 to almost 13,000, with the highest numbers in Madhya Pradesh.
They are less scared than tigers of people and often enter villages and even towns. Attacks on adults are rare but children are more at risk.
