Pilibhit (UP), May 10 : A 30-year-old farmer was critically injured when a leopard attacked him in his field in Rampura village under the jurisdiction of Neuria police circle. Vijay Pal was working in his sugarcane field when the leopard attacked him. Hearing Pal's cries, locals working in the adjacent fields rushed to the spot with sticks and scared the animal away. The injured was then shifted to the district hospital for treatment, where his condition has been described as critical. According to forest officials, the leopard had killed a jackal and was eating it in a nearby field, and attacked the farmer in the apprehension of a threat to his own life due to human presence in close proximity. The field forest teams of Pilibhit tiger reserve (PTR), the forest and wildlife division, and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) have been deployed in the area to monitor the movement of the leopard. On being asked about the solution to curb increasing man-animal conflict, the chief conservator of Bareilly zone, Lalit Verma, suggested that nature would gradually stabilise the population of felines in due course of time by increasing incidents of infighting in the species with unchanged forest area. "As an immediate solution, the villagers need to be cautious about felines, work in fields in groups, and make noise while moving through the fields," he said. Significantly, there has been an increase in the leopard population in PTR in the past couple of years. The official records of PTR show that the population of leopards in five forest range areas in the reserve was 36 in 2019, and went up sharply to 101 in 2022. /IANS