Kerala has been witnessing a considerable decline in its leopard population as they faced the wrath of rapid development, habitat loss, and retaliatory killing by humans.
Presenting a dismal picture of the big cat population in the State, the fifth cycle of leopard population estimation found the population to have fallen from 650 (with a standard error of 28) in 2018 to 570 (with a standard error of 76) in 2022.
The Status of Leopards in India 2022, jointly prepared by the National Tiger Conservation Authority and Wildlife Institute of India, also detected 63% of leopards to live outside the protected areas in the State and recorded a surge in the number of human-wildlife cases in the Western Ghats landscape including several parts of Kerala.
