Studying and protecting the leopard is also very much about people, those living with leopards but also a wider mass. I'm in the process of finishing some words on the plight of the leopard to go on our currently updating online platforms, I'll go into this whole issue there... for those interested and I wish more were.
But this whole issue is not just about the leopard, in many ways this much persecuted cat is a metaphor for many things going wrong in the human approach to the crisis we have man made regarding wildlife. I spend a lot of time trying to see the situation through the leopard's eyes, there's no doubt living with one in the mountains helped me in that process but as I work in the realms of coexistence strategy. rehabilitation and anti-trafficking I have found brick walls of blindness, denial and worst of all, lack of care.
Nature created a masterpiece in the leopard, it created an ecosystem engineer without peer, the result of thousands of years of evolution. Unless we can convince people of the importance and relevance of that, we are facing yet another situation of nature's hard work being undone...
