Summary

In “A Spot of Trouble”, Roach travels through the Middle Himalaya to Pauri Garhwal. She notes that “between 1918 and 1926, government recorders ascribed 125 kills to a single leopard, known in the global media of the day as the Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag” (77). Unlike the leopard attacks in North Bengal, leopards in Pauri Garhwal “stalk humans as prey” (78). Jim Corbett ascribes the attacks to the disposal of bodies during the flu pandemic in 1918, when villagers would place a coal in the corpse’s mouth and roll it down the hill. He pontificated that “it was these bodies that gave the Garhwal carnivores their taste for human meat” (79). While translocation has led to another leopard taking over the habitat, Naha asserts that capture and captivity is a more viable solution. However, the people of Pauri Garhwal want the leopards killed and...