IWN Report — Thursday, 30 July 2026
Two orphaned leopard cat kittens, hand-raised from infancy by vets in Assam, took their first steps back towards a wild life this week — into an acclimatisation enclosure in Raimona National Park, with no radio collars and about a month left before the door opens for good.
Small Beginnings
According to the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), the kittens — a male and a female — were found orphaned in Bedlangmari village, in Assam’s Dhubri district, in April. They were taken to WTI’s Mobile Veterinary Service unit at Charaikhola, in Kokrajhar district, and hand-raised under veterinary supervision from there.
The routine was unglamorous: fortnightly weigh-ins, vaccinations, liver tonics, behavioural monitoring. By late July, at around five months old, both kittens were judged fit for the next stage.
Learning Wild
On 28 July, the pair were shifted to Raimona National Park, a 422-square-kilometre reserve in Kokrajhar district that sits at the southern foothills of the Eastern Himalaya, forming a transboundary conservation landscape with Bhutan’s Phibsoo Wildlife Sanctuary and West Bengal’s Buxa Tiger Reserve, according to the district administration. Rather than being released outright, the kittens have gone into an in-situ acclimatisation enclosure — a holding facility built into the forest itself, meant to let animals adjust before the door opens for good.
“At approximately five months old, the leopard cats… were considered fit for soft release in the wild,” said Dr Daoharu Baro, WTI’s lead veterinarian on the case. The pair will spend around a month in the enclosure, developing what Baro calls site fidelity, before the final release.
There will be no collars this time. WTI says it lacks radio or satellite tracking equipment for this particular release, and will instead lean on direct sightings and camera-trap photographs to work out whether the cats survive and where they go. It is a cruder method than telemetry, but a common one across Indian rewilding work, where cameras and patience often do the job trackers would.
Small Cats
The kittens are the latest cases handled under WTI’s Greater Manas Recovery Project, run in partnership with the Assam Forest Department and supported by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW). The project has handled more than 100 small-cat cases to date — leopard cats, clouded leopards, jungle cats among them — with a 62 per cent release success rate, according to WTI.
Leopard cats are not rare, globally speaking. The IUCN’s Cat Specialist Group lists the species as Least Concern worldwide, pointing to its wide range and reasonable tolerance for degraded habitat. Within India, though, the same body considers the population endangered, and hunting the species is prohibited nationwide.
Neither kitten has a name, as far as WTI’s account goes. For the next month, that will matter rather less than whether a camera trap catches either of them somewhere in Raimona’s undergrowth, moving like something that was never dependent on anyone.
Sources: Wildlife Trust of India · Kokrajhar District Administration, Government of Assam · IUCN SSC Cat Specialist Group