"
Upon our arrival at the new camp at
10:00 hours, the vocalizations started again, just as had happened the day
before. I asked the cutters, why have the chimpanzees been vocalizing for
two days straight, from the same direction? I left three workers to
continue the camp work and took Kangonyesi and Garavura toward the
source of the sounds. When we arrived, we found a chimpanzee on the
ground 10 m from us, eating something white. LF says that the
chimpanzee was a medium-sized individual and had its back to the
observers, and they watched it feed for about 5 minutes. The site was in
dense forest on a hilltop above a river, in an area visited frequently by
chimpanzees (4°19.52’N, 24°41.44’E). We could not see well what the
chimpanzee was eating. I asked Kangonyesi to cough once, and when he
did, the chimpanzee moved off by climbing up a vine into the trees.
Arriving at the site, we found a leopard apparently killed by the
chimpanzee. The haunches and the two back legs had been eaten by the
ape. We examined it well and searched the leopard’s body, and saw that it
had two wounds on the neck and one on the side of the shoulder blade. I
took a sample of the leopard (its paw). LF cut off the front paw just above
the wrist and brought it back to Bili. It was killed by the chimpanzee
itself. The time is 10:49 am. The two back legs were mostly missing,
confirmed LF. He thought that the bite marks on the neck and shoulder
had been made by a chimpanzee, as there was much tearing where the
meat had been ripped from the presumed fatal wounds, consistent with
chimpanzee bites and not the puncture wounds of big cats. The leopard’s
neck appeared to have been broken"
They're often experts in the study. If it's a cub, then why didn't they mention that it was a cub? Depends on the situation, but in this one, I might as well apply it to other cases where the animal's age isn't stated.
I know there's a bunch of unknowns, but I'm sure the ape could use other ways of dealing with leopards or marking this corpse half a person's weight (ambush, group tactics, carcass scavenging, etc). Not just that it could be a weaker one.