An item on Foreign Correspondent on the ABC a few months back about Siberian Tigers. Foreign Correspondent - 03/04/2007: China - Siberian Tigers Includes video and a transcript of the story.
yeah i saw this. ya know what annoys me? siberian tigers are in trouble - even more so are amur leopards. the tigers are extremely common in zoos. the leopards less so, with even fewer pure breds but nonetheless miles ahead of their wild counterparts. if zoos breed endangered species to be "arks" and so that one day they can "release animals into the wild" i see no better time than now! there is something like just a couple of breeding female leopards left!! anyone? anyone?
Crocodylus has two of these amur leopards doesn't it. I've only ever seen one leopard in an australian zoo and that was through the shark tank and loungeroom of the owners house.
nope. crocodylus has persian leopards. you know someone who keeps a leopard and shark in their loungeroom?
ah that's right... my bad... Richard tindale... lo don't know him but they used to keep leopards on the other side of the house. you could see them by looking through the shark tank and the lounge room. National Zoo in canberra
You may be interested that on this side of the World there is quite a big push to increase the numbers of Amur Leopards by captive breeding. A number of Uk zoos have 'gone over' to this (sub)species in recent years and most zoos exhibiting leopards here now have these. They breed quite freely too. Not sure but I think its a similar pattern in Europe too.
i read that recent tests on the US animals dismissed the bulk from the breedingprogram as there was evidence of hybridisation. still, it implied there was till a bigger genepool in zoos than the wild. i think in the case of the amur leopards, a more effective result to boosting wild gentics with zoo stock might be acheived by, rather than introducing captive animals intothe wild, instead bring wild animals into captivity temporarily. if you can get a wild female inseminated or bred with a captive male (in an on site facility in the region of course) you could then release her again, where she would no doubt raise her half-captive-stock cubs to be wild, to be wild. this sort of methodology could be achieved with many species that are particuarly difficult to re-train to be wild. the trick is that you have to make sure the species never becomes extinct in the wild or the wild-learnt behaviours could be lost..
and you would have to convince a corrupt and increasingly hostile government to either invest money into such a venture or allow foreign agencies in to do the work for them. i like the idea, i really do...
I don't know anything about the leopards, just why are they declining so badly, usually leopards are the cat species that seems to thrive near humans 9 as in Africa)
I suspect its because this is a Russian species, where the hunting ethic is still very strong, and an animal protection very hard to maintain or enforce?