The Beautiful Cat: The Snow Leopard

Have you ever heard of the beautiful animal called the panthera uncia, also known as the snow leopard? Well these are one of the worlds most beautiful large cats in the world. But because of their beauty they have been hunted to near extinction. There are only a few thousand snow leopards left in existence and they are still being poached to their beautifully fine coats and their organs rich with nutrition and healthy supplements when used in traditional Chinese medicine. They were also hunted to the killing of domestic animals which made herders upset, which led to the killings of these cats. Due to the lack of snow leopards in the wild they are a very rare sight, and you should count yourself luck if you ever find one of these beautiful creatures.

Now that I have gotten past the horrible truth of the diminishing population of the snow leopards, I can now talk about the beauty, power, and habitat of the snow leopards. Snow leopards have fine gray fur that is well insolated. They need this insolation when living on the steepest of mountains in Asia.

Snow leopards have very strong legs do to the amount of trekking they have to do up and down the Asian mountain ranges. Their legs are so well trained that they are able to jump 50 feet into the air. In addition to using their legs to help them, snow leopards have learned to use their own tail as a blanket to cover sensitive spots from the cold of the mountain ranges.

The main source of food for snow leopards is mammals. Even though the snow leopard can take down mammals three times bigger than it, it mainly feeds on mountain goats, but if the snow leopard is feeling a bit adventures it will travel off the mountain and hunt marmots, game birds, and hares.

In conclusion these animals should be kept safe, and there are many teams that are trying to protect them like the Wildlife Conservation Study. All I would like for you to do is get the word out about the beautiful animals, and together we can stop poaching. Now look at the beauty of this animal below in the picture.

Photo Credit

I thank these two sites for helping me with this blog post.