A man scaled a 14ft-high boundary wall and jumped into the lions’ enclosure at the Alipore zoo on Friday morning, after which the animal dragged him around 30ft into its shelter.

The man, with a thick beard, was injured but alive when keepers managed to separate him from the lion. The Asiatic lion is said to have lunged at the man with a paw. “The lion acted more in self-defence because it got nervous by the intrusion. A full-fledged attack would have killed the man,” said a zoo vet.

The man, identified as Goutam Guchhait, injured his right leg, shoulder and waist, said an official at SSKM Hospital, where he was rushed from the zoo.

A zoo official quoted Guchhait, a resident of Patashpur in East Midnapore, as saying he had entered the lion’s den because he “wanted to save the animal”.

“Wild animals should not be caged,” Guchhait is said to have murmured.

A little before 11am, the man scaled an iron gate, accessed by keepers and vets, to enter the compound. “He climbed a palm tree to scale the 14ft-high wall. Jumping off the wall from the middle would have landed him in a moat. He walked on the wall to a corner and jumped into the enclosure,” the official said. “The keepers raised an alarm but he ignored them.”

Asis Kumar Samanta, the zoo director, was at the nearby giraffe enclosure when he was alerted about the intrusion.

“The man was lying inside the enclosure, writhing in pain. Vishwas, a male lion, went near him and lunged a paw at him. The lion then clawed him into one of the rooms in the night shelter at the rear end of the enclosure,” Samanta said.

The team of keepers, guards and vets entered the enclosure and started banging on the iron mesh at the rear end to divert the lion’s attention. The ploy worked and the moment Vishwas moved into the second room, a keeper shut the door of the first.

“The man was bleeding. We rushed him to hospital,” Samanta said.

Guchhait’s family told cops he left home three days ago. “He told his family that he was going to meet a tiger,” the police said.

“There is no fracture and he is stable,” a doctor at SSKM hospital said. “His mental health will also be examined.”