I absolutely love this photo of a male Amur Leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) having a quick drink at the Philadelphia Zoo; the only thing that spoils it is the fact that it's drinking out of a bowl, making it look more like a housecat and one of the Great Cats. As I've noted here before, visiting this particular individual is always bittersweet and Amur Leopards could be extinct in the wild during my lifetime, this animal being kept in a relatively small enclosure, often looking a bit bored. He likes to sit near the glass so lots of people come by to take pictures next to the "big kitty," but I wonder how many know that what they're looking at is one of the last representatives of a subspecies that has almost entirely vanished in the wild.
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You're right; it's a beautiful shot, but the fact that the leopard is drinking out of a bowl diminishes the sense of awe. One thing I appreciate about my country's zoo is the way every exhibit incorporates landscaped water features, whether moats or streams or such, so that animals can bathe or drink or even do a little bit of fishing as and when they wish.
And I'm also a little miffed that the Philadelphia zoo doesn't seem to be taking any steps to breed this leopard. I wonder; is he surplus? Does he have any congenital defects or poor genes? Or maybe he's already had a vasectomy. In any case, for crying out loud, if there's just 30 of them in the wild, I'd be racing to make sure that there were more of them breeding in zoos. It's a poor substitute for habitat protection, but I guess it does still give a glimmer of hope.
Just as the Amur tiger is slowly recovering in numbers, the Amur leopard is quickly slipping away. It's just so tragic. I've just started wondering if Amur tigers might somehow also negatively impact the potential recovery of the leopard, due to competitive exclusion of the sort that's been observed in Indian forests. Given that prey is a lot more sparsely distributed in the taiga, that could be an important factor.
Oh well. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that maybe the leopards in northern China and elsewhere might one day prove to belong to the same subspecies as the Amur leopard.
Nice picture. Seeing the big cat sipping its milk makes it look less scary ;-)
What I like is that the photo captures the cat curling his tongue under to scoop water into his mouth. When I was a young child, I ran across a comment that they do that, and was intrigued and puzzled, because it's so different from the way that human tongues work -- just try it! Anyway, I tried to observe my cats drinking to see if it was true, but their tongues move too fast to see properly. Now, at last, the photographic proof!