Leopards and Cougars, India and L.A.

The trouble started a year ago yesterday, when a cougar at Orange County's Whiting Ranch Park shifted its choice of prey from deer to mountain bikers, resulting in two attacks -- one fatal, the other nearly so -- in a single day. In the months that followed, mountain lions seemed to turn up everywhere: outside a high school in Rancho Santa Margarita, near a children's playground in Ventura County, by the old Toyon landfill in Griffith Park, up a tree in a La Canada Flintridge backyard. Each new sighting renewed concerns for public safety.

But if you think it was a bad year for big cats in the Los Angeles area, consider Bombay.

India's largest and most prosperous city spent much of 2004 gripped by panic over leopards, which in the last 12 months have killed 19 people. One of the spotted cats attacked a girl who had just returned home on a summer evening; it snatched her from outside the front door and dragged her into the darkness. Another leopard pounced on a middle-aged lawyer during his usual early morning meditative stroll. Many of the people killed were residents of slum dwellings without indoor plumbing. The cats struck as their victims squatted outside, heeding nature's call.

All of the leopard attacks occurred in or around Sanjay Gandhi National Park, a forest on Bombay's northern end that has lately been engulfed by urban development. It's a literal jungle -- fat vines and bamboo thickets -- surrounded by a metaphorical concrete one.

The leopards that live in the park often roam beyond it, ending up on fourth-floor balconies or beneath city buses. The cats have become a common sight on the nearby campus of the Indian Institute of Technology and the studio grounds of Film City, the heart of the Bollywood movie industry.

Leopard attacks are nothing new in Bombay, but when the cats killed 10 people in June alone, the simmering problem boiled over into a full-blown crisis.

Concerned citizens and politicians demanded action. Some suggested building a high wall or electric fence to keep the leopards in, an impractical solution for a park half as large as Catalina Island. Environmentalists theorized that the leopards might be leaving the park because of a lack of natural prey (a contention disputed by park officials), so wildlife authorities released pigs and rabbits into the forest to supplement the leopards' menu. That didn't stop the cats from wandering.