Authors
Claim
A viral Twitter post claims that in Assam a leopard visited a cow every night. It further claims that the relationship between the animals was nurtured when the cow began feeding its milk to the leopard after its mother died.
The viral tweet in context received over 22K likes and 7.4K retweets at the time of writing this fact check.
This claim with its images has been floating around on different social media platforms. Even former CM of Jammu & Kashmir, Omar Abdullah, retweeted the claim writing, “What an amazing story. Thanks for sharing.”
You can see more examples of the claim here, here and here.
Fact Check
As strange and unique this incident might sound, it’s true. A Leopard did visit a cow in a village, but it wasn’t in Assam and it wasn’t recently. This happened around two decades ago in 2002 in a village named Antoli in Vadodara, Gujarat. Continue reading to learn more about it.
As a starting point, we began with a keyword search on Google and came across a Times of India article from 2002 which detailed this incident. Comparing it to Hindi cinema’s Ek Chhoti Si Love Story, this incident took place for-real, but in Vadodara’s Antoli village not Assam, states the news report.
During our search we also found a health and wellness website, On Forest.com, which published a post in 2014 about the same encounter.
We reached out to Mr. HS Singh who was the conservator of forests in the district of Vadodara at the time of the incident in context. Having witnessed this unique meeting of the cow and leopard first hand, he confirmed this incident taking place in Vadodara, 2002. “Unique in its way, nobody could explain why this was happening. The cow and leopard were both responsive to each other,” he shared.
Regarding the recent claim of this incident taking place in Assam, he clarified that it did not happen in Assam and the cow did not give milk to the leopard.
You can read about this claim in our Hindi fact check here.
Conclusion
From the TOI news report linked as well as a confirmation from Mr. HS Singh, former conservator of forests, Vadodara, we can say that the elaborate claim of the leopard meeting a cow in Assam is misleading. In reality, the two animals spent time together back in 2002 in Antoli village, Vadodara, Gujarat.
Tools Used
- Google advanced search
- Twitter advanced search
Result: Misleading
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