This post is at Facebook if you wish to comment. It is a follow up to some posts made there re trophy hunting but in a seriously bad time for big cats I wanted to bring just a little bit of levity.
Thanks to those who have read and cared about the recent posts I made on Facebook re trophy hunting. Personally I have a big back story to this, something I don't have time to talk about right now but one of the overlooked aspects of trophy hunting is the message it sends out re certain species, and the leopard is certainly in this category, is that they are so abundant the "legal" killing of them is not an issue. Once again this comes back to serious flaws in conservation status management and understanding.
It also leads back into perceptions, another aspect that is seriously hampering the leopard. On a slightly lighter note (because my god in this work one needs as many of those as one can get), while going through some notes of a few years ago I found this image. In mountain areas I used to carry these three photos and when interviewing people who had an encounter with a big cat in a remote mountain area I would ask which photograph resembled the cat encountered. Leopard was the answer most of the time and snow leopard a decent percentage. But there were many who claimed to have seen tiger, as in panthera tigris, the striped big cat. Many of those claims were vehement, and well, it cannot be discounted because tiger has been camera trapped at altitude in some parts of south Asia. It also gets confusing because in many places here in Nepal the word tiger is the generic description for all larger cats (and sometimes smaller cats, and species like civet... and yep, even dogs).
So when someone was absolutely adamant they had seen "tiger" at these higher altitudes (as in the large striped cat) and pointed to
the photo of panthera tigris, I would sometimes use a follow up question "had you been smoking ganja at the time?"
The answers were what they were :)
