A wildlife veterinary surgeon was injured on Wednesday morning when a hill-country leopard he was attempting to rescue from a wire trap broke free and sprang at him, the Daily Mirror reported.
Dr. Akalanka Pinideniya, of the Randenigala veterinary hospital, approached the trap and tried to tranquilise the animal. The leopard tore loose from the snare, lunged at him and ran into the jungle. He sustained minor injuries.
The animal was healthy — which is why it got away
Dr. Pinideniya’s own assessment supplies the explanation for what happened. He said the leopard was a well-grown animal that had not been seriously injured by the trap. It was in good health and retained the strength to break out of the snare.
That detail inverts the usual reading of such an incident. The attack was not the act of a maimed or dying animal but of an uninjured one with the power to free itself at the moment it was approached — which is also the best available outcome for the leopard, and the reason it was able to return to the jungle rather than require capture and treatment.
Snares
Wire traps are a recurring threat to Sri Lanka’s leopard population, particularly in the hill country, where snares set for wild boar and deer catch leopards indiscriminately. Rescues of this kind are routinely carried out by Department of Wildlife Conservation veterinary teams, and they are hazardous by nature: sedating a trapped and frightened predator at close range leaves little margin if the restraint fails first.
Sri Lanka’s leopard (Panthera pardus kotiya) is an endemic subspecies listed as vulnerable.
Not reported
The Daily Mirror does not give the location of the trap beyond the Randenigala reference, or say who found the animal and alerted the veterinary team. It does not say how long the leopard had been caught, who set the snare, or whether any investigation has been opened into the trapping.
It does not describe the extent of Dr. Pinideniya’s injuries beyond calling them minor, say whether he required hospital treatment, or report any comment from him beyond his assessment of the animal. It does not say whether the leopard is being tracked, whether it is thought to have carried any part of the snare away with it, or whether a further rescue attempt is planned.
No other verified newsroom had filed on the incident at the time of writing, and this account rests on a single source.
One caution for readers searching for this story. A closely similar incident — a wildlife veterinarian attacked by a snared leopard that broke free during an attempted tranquilisation, then ran back into the jungle — was reported in March 2023, involving a different veterinarian at Yala National Park. The two are separate events three years apart. Search results for Wednesday’s incident surface the 2023 report prominently, and the framing is near-identical.
