India, Oct. 17 -- Domestic buffaloes can more than just threaten leopards by closing ranks, as narrated in these columns two Sundays ago. They can cause bodily harm, if the leopard does not exercise discretion. In Africa, wild Cape buffaloes, renowned as 'black death', have turned the tables on lions and wealthy American hunters.

Thumbing through notes on natural history archived in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), Vol. 52, I came across evidence of the domestic buffalo's lethal aggression.

JM Power's note of January 2, 1954, recounted an incident from the Curzon Estate in the Nilgiris. "A herd of domestic buffaloes had been driven into a stone kraal for the night when a fairly small but full-grown male panther ...