What affects us affects cats
Wow, this is a classy photograph and I am very demanding when it comes to standards in photography. I think this is the best snow leopard photograph I have seen. It shows us the cold, rocky, harsh landscape in which snow leopards live. The cats are looking at the camera. They are aware of …
“In the wild and in captivity, most young are born in May and June, following a gestation period of 94 to 103 days.” The verbatim quote is from Mel and Fiona Sunquist’s premier book on the wild cat species, Wild Cats Of The World. The Sunquists refer to the international snow leopard studbook. The …
Here are three audio files which tell you what snow leopards sound like. The sounds are unmistakably from a large wild cat. There is that raw and intimidating aspect to wild cat sounds, even those from small wild cats. Sometimes people expect wild cats to sound a little like domestic cats and there is …
Do snow leopards have predators? The answer is a clear, No, with one notable exception: the human. The reason is a common sense one: there are no predators as able as the snow leopard over much of its range. Apart from humans the snow leopard’s only competitors are wolves. I can’t confirm if the …
No, snow leopards do not kill humans. In fact they rarely attack humans in the wild. There are only a few records of snow leopards attacking people and no records of this cat killing humans. “They readily relinquish kills of domestic livestock even to a child brandishing a stick. They rarely defend themselves, and …
Why are snow leopards called ‘ounce’? It is quite a long and tortuous journey from Greek via Latin together with some ad hoc adjustments to the word and in my view a mispronunciation to end up with the word “ounce”.
The snow leopard lifespan for females, on average and in captivity, is 9.6 years (Ref: O’Connor T and H Freeman 1982 Maternal behaviour a behavioural developments in the captive snow leopard (Panthera u. uncial). International pedigree book of snow leopards 3: 103-110). However, a female snow leopard in the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, Colorado gave …
Globally, it is estimated, that there are between 4,080 and 6,590 snow leopards left in the world as at Sept. 2017. However, the effective population size is about half that at 2,040 to 3,295. The effective population is described as the number of mature individuals capable of reproduction. It is also described as the …
