Posted on 07/10/2019 7:16:10 AM PDT by entropy12
BookMark!
That’s gonna leave a mark.
Amazing video! Thanks..
The agility of these animals is surreal.
Imagine people living on earth in the year 3000 and beyond..they will never see these beautiful and magnificent creatures in wild. May be only in zoo’s? But without the rigorous exercise in the wild, they will be just caricatures.
They aren’t hard to see in a lot of areas if you drive down a dry riverbed with a light at night! Plenty of leopards! My last time there, the guy I was hunting with was recovering from a leopard bite in his left arm.
The problem is not that leopards (or other big cats) are already extinct, but rather that their numbers have dwindled at an unsustainable rate.
Compare the population of big cats just 100 years ago to current time. These cats have been around for many millenniums at stable population numbers. Current numbers are smaller by orders of magnitude. Without these carnivores expect overpopulation of herbivores who can denude forests in excess numbers.
So it is not a stretch to posit that the carnivores are contributing to climate stability.
big cars in general and leopards are not in the same position. Leopards are certainly not unsustainable. They are very plentiful and do quite well close to civilization. I’ve seen plenty of them with my own eyes, I don’t have to read about it!
Lions are another story, they don’t do so well around humans.
In one area where I hunted in Namibia, cheetahs were prolific, they were hunted by anyone that wanted to from Europe, the US wouldn’t let them be imported. As my PH said, the US decided that they are endangered, so US hunters can’t kill them, so we book guys from Germany and Spain to hunt them. Makes perfect sense.
Zoos perform a vital function for species survival and general education, but I hope that some wild spaces will still survive.
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