A war-torn Ukraine has trapped an Indian doctor in a cellar with his two pet large animals, a panther and a leopard. Dr. Girikumar Patil, from Severodonetsk in the Donbas area, lives in a bunker beneath his house.
Separatists rule the region, and the situation is rapidly deteriorating. Dr. Patil, on the other hand, is not ready to abandon the animals.
“I will never, ever forsake my dogs in order to preserve my own life.” My family, of course, is pressing me to return. My dogs are like children to me. “Until my dying breath, I’ll be with them and defend them,” he told The New Indian Express (TNIE).
In 2007, Dr. Patil moved to Ukraine to study medicine and eventually resided in Donbas. He eventually worked as an orthopaedic surgeon at a local government hospital, according to TNIE.
He spotted the “orphaned and ailing” jaguar in a nearby zoo and adopted it with the consent of the authorities. Yasha is the name given to the animal by Dr. Patil. He presented Sabrina, a black panther, to Yasha as a mate two months ago.
Mr Patil has only been out of his cellar to buy food for his cats since the conflict began, according to the BBC. According to the BBC storey, the male jaguar is 20 months old and the female panther is a six-month-old youngster.
“My big cats have been spending nights in the basement with me. There has been a lot of bombing happening around us. The cats are scared. They are eating less. I can’t leave them,” the 40-year-old told the BBC.
Dr. Patil also owns three Italian mastiffs and uses his YouTube channel, which has over 84,000 members, to collect money for them.
Dr. Patil comes from Tanuku, in the West Godavari region of Andhra Pradesh. He hopes that the Indian government would allow him to bring all of his animals home with him. As part of the national government’s Operation Ganga, Indian student Rishabh Kaushik, a native of Dehradun, returned to India with his rescued pet dug “Maliboo” last week.
