The death of little Tanzeela, a minor, in Midoora village of south Kashmir’s Awantipora on Saturday is yet another example of recurring horrors of man–animal conflict in Kashmir. Environmentalists and wildlife scientists have been repeatedly warning that the rapidly changing land-use planning that erodes wild habitat, local waste and livestock practices that draw predators into settlements, and patchy prevention and response by authorities are responsible for these tragedies. Unless all three are fixed together, these avoidable deaths will repeat. Official data shows the scale and the trend of the horrors that have deprived families of their loved ones. The Jammu & Kashmir Department of Wildlife Protection’s own figures put total human deaths from wild animals in hundreds (264 deaths and 3,164 injuries recorded from 2006 to March 2024). Alarmingly, these numbers show a rising year-on-year trend in the early 2020s (5 deaths in 2020–21, 10 in 2021–22, then 14 and 16 in the following years). This data points to a clear upward trend in human–leopard encounters and the larger man-animal conflicts over the last decade. Why is this spike happening? The drivers of this disturbing trend are textbook ecological reasons and governance gaps. Rapid urban expansion, shrinkage and fragmentation of forested corridors, and depletion of natural prey in Kashmir valley force wild animals to range closer to villages and even cities as recent examples have shown. Poor waste management and free-grazing livestock provide easy food; night-time movement by children and women for chores increases exposure. Rescue and containment capacity is still limited: capture cages, tranquiliser teams and rapid-response units exist but are thinly spread and reactive rather than preventive. But a good thing is that practical prevention is possible and it is urgently needed. At the community level, treating waste and food-attractants as a public-health hazard: strict garbage collection, covered bins, and community clean-ups will deny easy food to predators who will have to look for other places for food. In rural areas, securing livestock at night in predator-proof corrals and improving compensation schemes so families don’t retaliate to such measures due to need of buying food for the livestock will also help in preventing man-animal conflicts. The government should also expand trained rapid-response rescue teams (cages, tranquiliser experts) and equip them with GPS, drones and camera-trap monitoring to detect animals early. Besides, the government should set up legally protected movement corridors and degraded habitats so leopards can find wild prey away from homes. There is also a need for community education and local wildlife watchers which combine science and local knowledge to reduce fear and more conflicts. Finally, policymakers must treat human–animal conflict as a long-term governance task, not a series of one-off operations to prevent future tragedies.