Acknowledgements: This study emanates from a larger study supported by Panthera Corporation, New York. We thank Director, SACON for facilitating and supporting the work. We thank IISER, Pune for laboratory space and chemicals, the Forests and wildlife Department of Kerala for permits, logistic help and discussions; Mahatma Gandhi University, School of Environmental Sciences, Kottayam and IISER, Trivandrum for accommodation in their guest houses. We thank M. Ravi, our driver during the field survey. Several people we interacted with, provided information on locations of sites, especially Ajay, Ayyapan, Chacko, Charan, Christopher, Prasanth, Rajeevan, Subramany and Toms for providing information and accompanying us to various sites. We also thank Ginson, Subin and Thangappan for information on the wild cats they had seen. We are grateful to Hema for facilitating accommodation at Trivandrum. We thank Mansi, Gouri and many others in the laboratory at IISER, Pune for helping us through stressful troubleshooting as well as making our stay and work enjoyable. We are grateful to Velumani and Prachi who helped enormously with troubleshooting as well as with ordering and suggesting various DNA extraction kits when we needed them urgently. We thank the editor and reviewers of the manuscript for their comments.