An ailing leopard cub which was being treated by veterinary doctors in Muzaffarabad died on Thursday evening — hardly 15 hours after it was rescued by wildlife guards from a mountain village of Azad Jammu and Kashmir (AJK), an official said.

The one-year-old cub from the family of common leopards, zoologically referred to as Panthera Pardus, had descended on Ghaziabad village of district Bagh from nearby forests at about 5pm on Wednesday.

Naeem Iftikhar Dar, director AJK wildlife and fisheries department, said the cub was ill when it suddenly appeared in a small bazaar in the area, to the fear of the people present there.

Ostensibly due to illness, it took refuge in a vacant shop whose shutter was immediately pulled down by the people from outside.

Meanwhile, dozens of other people, many of them wielding sticks, gathered at the place. Subsequently, two senior officials from the local administration and forests department also rushed to the spot along with police to ensure that no one caused any harm to the frightened cub.

The AJK Wildlife Act provides legal protection to the leopard, placing it in the third schedule among animals that cannot be killed, captured or kept in possession. However, the law at the same time allows shooting of the carnivore in an act of self-defence or protecting livestock outside the demarcated forests.

Dar said the forests department officer called him with a request to send a team of skilled persons to cage the animal. The team, led by assistant director Sakhi Zaman, reached Ghaziabad at about midnight.

As the team possessed just an animal transportation cage and no tranquilizer gun, it took them more than three hours to cage the animal which was eventually brought to the wildlife office in Muzaffarabad at 6:30am on Thursday.

Veterinary doctors started providing treatment to the cub at the disease investigation centre of the AJK animal husbandry department, he said, adding that the animal, however, could not survive and died in the evening.

He said the postmortem of the cub would be conducted to determine the exact cause of its death, following which its skin would be flayed for stuffing.

The authoritative Red List of Threatened Species compiled by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) classifies Panthera Pardus as “near threatened” species.

In Pakistan, this species is found in the mountains of Kashmir, adjoining Murree hills and parts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Although according to IUCN Red List their population is decreasing, wildlife officials in AJK claim indirect evidence has shown that it has increased in AJK over the past decade.

The numbers of many wildlife species have increased in AJK over the years due to certain conservation initiatives by the concerned government departments as well as awareness in the communities, Dar said, adding that this increase had led to the shrinkage of available habitat of these animals which was why some animals occasionally descend on human populations in search of space and food.

“When these animals kill livestock, they are attacked by villagers in retaliation or revenge,” he said.

Dar regretted that his department was ill-equipped to handle such situations.

Lack of rehabilitation centres, trained staff, and vets specialising in the treatment of wildlife species had been hampering conservation efforts, he said.

For the very reason, the cub that died on Thursday was kept in one of the office rooms of wildlife department with three electric heaters switched on to maintain room temperature, he said.

Some five months ago, a similar situation had arisen in a village of Jhelum Valley district when a leopard entered the livestock corral of a villager. As the AJK wildlife department personnel did not possess dart gun to render the carnivore unconscious, they had brought people from the wildlife department of neighbouring KP to carry out the task. The animal was later released in Moji Game Reserve in Leepa valley.