one down, six left

Well, time for another of those downer posts. I'd been wanting to post another zoo shot, and although I just did a big cat picture I really like big cats and wanted to add an Amur Leopard picture. So there it is, thank you Brookfield Zoo for making your enclosures so photographer friendly. This was actually shot through a sort of nylon mesh barrier, but I've gotten quite good results using wide apertures and just blurring the mesh into obscurity.

Now for the downer news. The Amur Leopard is critically endangered. There are estimated to be 25-34 of them left in the wild. And until recently there were believed to be only seven females left. Now they're down to six after someone shot one and then clubbed it to death.
Check out a version of the story here
Here's the thing. It's not like it was hunted for a trophy, or for its pelt or anything. Not even for chinese traditional medicine (I try to respect traditional cultures, but when you hunt animals to near extinction in order to supply faith medicine I draw the line). It was killed and the body was left behind. No point to it at all.

I want to stress something about zoos that I think some animal rights activitists are getting tragically wrong. YES, I'll admit that in some cases animals do not have a great life living inside a zoo. I do not enjoy seeing large predators pacing back and forth inside their enclosures. But there's more at stake than just one animal.
Brookfield has what appear to be a mating pair of Amur Leopards. I don't have any inside sources of information so I don't know any details, I can only assume that they're trying to breed them but that they may not be having any luck. Although I couldn't help but notice that for the past few months I've only seen one in the enclosure. I'm hoping that this means that the female is pregnant and has been separated from the male. Captive breeding programs are the last ditch effort to save species from extinction, or restore animals that are already extinct in the wild. What the animal rights extremists seem to fail to realize is that zoos are doing the best they can with the limiting funding they possess. Shut them down and numerous species would suffer. If you want to debate the whole "good of the many being more important than the good of the few" argument then feel free.. but by trotting out individual cases of suffering animals and using them to argue that zoos should be completely shut down they're showing a woeful lack of understanding of the big picture.