That is a Leopard, and It Has Come to Destroy

A woman in rural India battled a leopard in a brutal fight to the death. That's a leopard in the video above. She had a sickle, but my money would have been on the leopard. That is fucking intense. In related news my alarm went off super early yesterday and man, that sucked. So I know the feeling. Kind of.

For real, how does that happen? These attacks happen more often than we realize but this woman was a little bit lucky and a whole lot of tough. Tough really isn't the word; I don't know what word to use.

Some backstory: I learned a lot when I volunteered at the local animal shelter. One of the things I learned is "volunteering at the local animal shelter sucks" and also "animal shelter volunteers tend to be crazy animal rights weirdos". But the story I tell most often is to try and get people to guess what the most dangerous animal at the shelter was. We had shelter animals, rescues, and also any random animals picked up by animal control: snakes, turtles, dogs, cats, pigs, a goat, caiman, ducks, rabbits (so many goddamn rabbits), etc. No big cats or bears but just about everything else. 

What's your guess? Was the most scary animal the fighting pit bull? Or was it the rattlensakes? Hint: it was distantly related to that leopard. The animal that made everyone uncomfortable, and the animal that they would most often kill instead of release for adoption, was feral cats. They were unadobptable. Bigger than your average house cat and 100x more pissed, they were more consistently savage and vicious than any other animal. Even the most savage pit bull would settle down after a while. Not the feral cats. They are terrifying bundles of hate. People would gear up like they were going to do some ARC welding to handle cats, including the helmet and mask and everything. So when I imagine what that looks like in a cat that weighs 10x as much it frankly freaks me the fuck out. So, yeah: leopards. I prefer to appreciate them from a safe distance, like "via the internet".