The first time I heard about a snow leopard was when I read about them in Zoobooks.  I got the whole set of those magazines.  I can’t remember if they had their own issue or it was one for big cats.  All I remember is that they were said to have the greatest long jump of the big cats.  Not sure why that stuck with me for years before I bothered to learn more about them.

Snow leopards are considered vulnerable with there being 4,000-6,500 left in the wild according to the WWF.  As you can expect, they are poached for their beautiful furs, which look better on them than people.  Human activity and climate change is fracturing their habitat as well.  This puts them into conflict with humans and can result in retaliatory killings.  This is when a snow leopard hunts a farmer’s livestock and is hunted down…