A female leopard was found resting on a sofa at a house in Tikathali of Lalitpur district on Tuesday. The animal rescue team of the Central Zoo reached the spot after around 4 hours and took the wild cat under control. A huge crowd had gathered to see the leopard, which was lying on a sofa at the home of a local Krishna Bahadur K.C. When the zoo officials, Radhakrishna Gharti and Dr Balkrishna Giri started the process of taking the leopard under control even more people had gathered around. According to Gharti, it is unusual for a leopard to choose a sofa to rest on, however, it isn´t an extremely rare scene though. “Even earlier a few leopards have sneaked into people´s houses and remained inside for hours. May be it is because they sense danger after seeing people outside,” he said. As the leopard was inside a room, it was not challenging for the team to tranquilize it. In a recent incident, Dr Gharti was severely injured while trying to rescue a leopard, which was ultimately killed. Leopards sightings in the periphery of the valley is no more a strange matter, commented Gharti. “In fact, it has become so common that we need to have better mechanism to deal with the wild animals,” he said.  “Why do the animals come to human settlement? It is just because their habitat has been encroached upon by humans. Our experience tells us that people are largely responsible to provoke the animals, due to lack of awareness about what they should do when animals are seen in human settlement,” he added. The rescue team had reached the spot at around 12 noon after they were called by the district police office. The leopard was released at Shivapuri jungle after it was rescued.