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The Devilish Cunning Panther of India
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In 1858, the Central Provinces of British India had more to fear than British occupation and an unhealthy obsession with cricket. They had a serial killer of Dexter-like proportions, if Dexter was a leopard with balls of steel. In a supreme act of don't-give-a-fuckery, this leopard would invite itself into a person's residence at night, suck all their blood from the neck, and then simply leave the corpse there, as if to prove that it wasn't killing out of necessity but for the pure hell of it. Despite heightened alerts, the leopard managed to go on merrily offing people for over a year, racking up a body count of nearly a hundred goddamned victims (other sources say 150).
W.H. Drake
It's almost as big as the leopard's body count in the pre-Disneyfied Jungle Book.
The leopard acquired the evil, yet generic nickname of "The Devilish Cunning Panther," and such was its reputation that people in the area were afraid to even leave their houses (as if that could help). And so Britain did the only thing they could do -- send in a white guy with a gun. And that's when things got really creepy.
As the hunter soon found out, this wasn't your average vicious man-eating feline. The hunter tried to outsmart the leopard by setting up the corpse of one of its victims in the forest as bait and waiting up in a tree with a loaded rifle. However, the leopard showed up at night, when it was too dark to shoot accurately. The hunter shot into the air to try to spook the animal into coming out where there was more light, but the thing didn't even flinch. It just kept feeding on the corpse and stayed there until it decided it was done with its meal, which is to say, when only hands and feet were left.
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"I've seen how you use those hands. No thanks."
Defeated, the hunter returned to the village and went to sleep for the night ... only to wake up to the distinct sound of a leopard stalking him outside his tent and even clawing at the fabric, trying to get in. At this point, it's no longer accurate to refer to the human as the hunter and the leopard as the prey. If a villager hadn't shouted at that moment, we're pretty sure the guy would have ended up as a rug inside a cave.
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