When it comes to the poaching of endangered species, elephants, tigers and rhinos tend to be in the limelight. But a new report sets out to plug the information gap on a different species that is imperiled by a tide of demand related to rising affluence in Asia: leopards.
In India alone, an average of at least four leopards have been poached each week over the last 10 years, according to Traffic, an organization that monitors the trade in endangered wildlife around the globe and issued the report. That?s more than 2,000 in one decade.
The estimate is based on a review of seizures of spotted leopard skins and other body parts. While most of the items seized were skins, other body parts, particularly bones, are prescribed as substitutes for tiger parts in traditional Asian medicine, Traffic said.
?Even though reports of illegal trade in leopard body parts are disturbingly frequent, the level of threat to leopards in the country has previously been unrecognized and has fallen into our collective ?blind spot?,? said Rashid Raza, the lead author of the report, which was released on Friday in New Delhi.
There are no reliable estimates of how many leopards exist in India. The animals are notoriously wary of humans and are spread out over large areas, so tracking their numbers is difficult.
Yet the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, which categorizes leopards as ?near threatened? on its so-called red list of species, says that leopard populations have become extinct in some parts of the world and dwindled to tiny numbers in others. Although they dwell widely in the forests of the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia and China, they are ?becoming increasingly rare outside protected areas,? the organization says.
Divyabhanusinh Chavda, president of the World Wildlife Fund?s India chapter, said that concerted national action was needed. ?Without an effective strategy to assess and tackle the threats posed by illegal trade, the danger is that leopard numbers may decline rapidly, as happened previously to the tiger,? he said.
Government estimates put the number of tigers in India at little more than 1,700.
Source: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/28/148691/?partner=rss&emc=rss
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