NEWS
Rare Snow Leopard Caught In India; Instead Of Returning It To Mountains, Officials Send It To Zoo!
A rare snow leopard has been found and captured in a remote village in the Indian Himalaya.
According to a report in AFP, the endangered creature was captured after it killed livestock and got caught inside a pen containing sheep and goats.
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"The big cat was unable to escape from the enclosure after killing a few livestock.
"The shepherd contacted us, and we captured the animal in a cage,” said wildlife official Hardev Negi, who led the team that caught the snow leopard.
Experts will take care of it
Officials later revealed that the leopard which had killed 43 sheep and goat would be transferred to a nearby zoo.
The state's chief wildlife official Savita Sharma told AFP that the decision to transfer the animal to a zoo at Shimla was made as it involved "wild animal-human conflict".
Animal activists have been angered by the decision to not only uproot the leopard from it's original home but to relocate it to the zoo which has an extremely confined space and significantly hotter temperatures.
According to the World Wildlife Fund, there are only 44 snow leopards left at the valleys of Himachal Pradesh and only 4,000 left in other mountainous areas around the world.
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