After months of struggle, Indian doctor bids goodbye to pet jaguar, leopard in Ukraine

An Indian-born doctor, who was stuck in the conflict-torn Ukraine for months with his two pets—a jaguar and leopard—has been forced to let go of them.

Gidikumar Patil, a 42-year-old doctor who became a Ukrainian citizen in 2016, had to leave his pets in search of a living in neighbouring Poland after the hospital he was working with was bombed in the Russia-Ukraine war.

Patil bought the animals in 2020 from a zoo in the capital Kyiv. One of the cats is a 24-month-old male "lepjag"— a rare hybrid of a male leopard and a female jaguar — while the other one is a 14-month-old female black panther.

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When the Russian invasion began, Patil, who is unmarried, vowed not to leave without his pets. He was working as an orthopaedic doctor in a hospital in Svavtove, a small town in Severodonetskin the Luhansk region of eastern Ukraine, reports BBC.

But he could not sustain himself as the hospital where he was working closed before being bombed and it became very difficult to feed them.He used to spend $300 on food, which mostly consisted of 5 kg chicken every day after the war began.

Eventually, he spent all of his savings and soldpart of his farmland, two apartments, two cars, his motorcycle and camera for a little over $100,000.

Patil left home in Ukraine with a bag carrying his clothes, $100 and a few thousand roubles in cash. He left the cats with a caretaker, paid him $2,400 as three months of wages and decided to cross the border, hoping one day he would earn some money and return.

"As the situation worsened and bomb attacks inched closer to my home and I ran out of money, I decided to leave the cats with a caretaker, cross the border, earn some money and return," Giri told BBC.

But the plan didn’t quite work out the way he thought.

While trying to cross the border, he was detained by Russian soldiers on the suspicion of being a spy and was interrogated for three days.

Only after he convinced them that he is not participating in the war and showed the YouTube videos he used to make with his animals that he was finally let go. But they seized his passport and issued him a paper identification and dropped him off near the Polish border.

After Patil shared his ordeal with the Polish authorities, they gave him a "paper visa" which allows him to stay in the country for 90 days, he said. Then he took a night bus to Warsaw.

As the situation worsens in Ukraine, Patil says he is clueless about when he will return to his cats.

Though his family from the southern Andhra Pradesh state, India, is sending him money, he has been knocking on the doors of Indian embassies to get his cats back.

"I have contacted the Indian embassy in Kyiv a few times on phone and WhatsApp, asking them whether they could take my cats out of Ukraine. They told me they don't deal with wild animals," he was quoted as saying.

“I want my cats back. If the Indian government can pick them up and take them home to a zoo or a forest in India, it is fine. I just want to save them."

(With inputs from agencies)

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