Leopard of Rudraprayag

For the next eight years, people were afraid to venture alone at night on the road to the Hindu holy shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath, for it passed through the leopard's territory, and few villagers left their houses after dark.

The leopard, preferring human flesh, would break down doors, leap through windows, claw through the mud or thatch walls of huts and drag the occupants out before devouring them.

Corbett's notes revealed that this leopard, a large elderly male, was in fine condition except for a few healed injuries sustained from hunters after it had become a man-eater.

Corbett wrote that, in his opinion, human bodies left unburied during disease epidemics were the main reason for the Rudraprayag and Panar leopards to become man-eaters.

At the end of the introduction of his book Man-Eaters of Kumaon, Corbett wrote: A leopard, in an area in which his natural food is scarce, finding these bodies very soon acquires a taste for human flesh, and when the disease dies down and normal conditions are established, he very naturally, on finding his food supply cut off, takes to killing human beings.