[ad_1]
SHIMLA, India: A rare snow leopard caught while attacking cattle in a remote village in the Indian Himalayas will be sent to a zoo instead of being released, officials said Sunday (May 3), sparking outrage from the activists.
The endangered creature was found Saturday after being trapped inside a pen containing sheep and goats in the village of Giu, near the Tibetan border in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.
“The big cat was unable to escape the enclosure after killing some animals,” wildlife official Hardev Negi, who led the team that caught the snow leopard, told AFP.
“The pastor contacted us and we captured the animal in a cage.”
Savita Sharma, the state’s official wildlife director, told AFP that the snow leopard was not released as the incident involved “wild animal-human conflict,” adding that he would be transferred to a zoo in the foothills outside of the state capital Shimla.
Authorities estimated that the juvenile animal killed 43 sheep and goats in the pen for four days.
According to Sharma, only 44 snow leopards live in the high passes and rugged valleys of Himachal Pradesh.
Rajeshwar Negi, the National Coordinator for Nature Watch India, said the decision sentenced the creature to a life without freedom.
“Don’t you know how stressful it will be for the animal to be transported on a 350 kilometer bumpy road,” he told AFP.
“Does that mean the snow leopard will spend the rest of its life in a zoo instead of the wild ones in the Himalayas?”
He added that the animal would also suffer in the highest temperatures at the Shimla Zoo, which is significantly warmer than its natural habitat.
According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, only 4,000 of the mysterious animals could be left in the high mountains of Central Asia, their only habitat.
Negi said that snow leopards were forced to move to lower altitudes and hunt domestic animals, as the populations of their natural prey, the mountain goat and the blue sheep, have been decimated by hunting.
Global warming is also threatening the survival of the big cat, with warmer temperatures pushing the tree line higher and causing farmers to move higher in the mountains to plant crops and graze cattle, invading the territory of leopards in the snows.
