This video was posted in 2011. Now, the IUCN Red List has moved this species up to “Vulnerable.” It is an amazing video–this is one of the few cat species I have had difficulty finding images for. Advertisements
Tag: endangered cats
Many years ago, I saw a snow leopard at the Bronx Zoo–it was beautiful, but it hated captivity. You could see that. We don’t want them to go extinct, but it’s best to keep these mountain-country big cats wild and free, if at all possible.
A search will bring up posts here about some of these species. Featured image: Black-footed cat, by Charles Barilleaux, CC BY 2.0.
Southeast Asia’s flat-headed cat is even rarer than the fishing cat. It’s also considered to be a better fisher.
Most people wouldn’t consider “saving wetlands” as the method of choice for protecting an endangered cat, but it’s just what Southeast Asia’s fishing cat needs. The only member of the cat family to live on fish is becoming increasingly rare outside Bangladesh and parts of eastern India.
All cats, big and small, like to keep secrets. It is our task as cat lovers to learn some of those secrets so we can make life even better for these beauties. The cats don’t make it easy for us. So we fool them. Today, technology like camera traps and GPS tracking collars collect a lot of data about unsuspecting domestic and wild cats. Then we laypeople help the experts use these tools to learn more about cats.
Clouded leopards are adorable.
The “clouds” are those beautiful dark blotches on the coat.
These wild felines aren’t close relatives of the leopard, but modern research shows that clouded leopards do belong with the big cats. Their head and face are a little weird looking. That could be because these Southeast Asian cats are primitive – the first big cats to evolve some 11 million years ago. But some paleontologists have a different explanation for it.
Snow leopards aren’t leopards that live in snowy country. “Panthera uncia” is actually a separate species and more closely related to the tiger. While leopards rule in southern Asia, snow leopards own the alpine and subalpine zones from the Himalayas northward, across the Tibet plateau and the Central Asian high country, to mountainous southern Siberia.
This post was intended to be the usual brief fact about how the rare Florida panther survived Hurricane Irma.
I figured that enough time has passed for people to have some idea of how these cats and other wildlife on the mainland fared.
I underestimated Irma’s impact on Florida.
The world’s most famous spotted cat is a little better off than other big cats. Although its range has shrunk, the leopard still calls two continents home. Since leopards can adapt to almost any environment from sea level up to around 17,000 feet in the Himalayas, you will find them in most of sub-Saharan Africa and across much of southern/northeast Asia. While the overall species isn’t endangered, some leopard subspecies are. But in India the high numbers of both leopards and people are causing serious problems.
