Killing of leopard sparks outrage

Islamabad: A video showing killing of a common leopard somewhere in Azad Jammu and Kashmir sparked outrage among the wildlife lovers who have demanded of the government to identify the culprits and take legal action against them.

According to the details, the video has been posted on the social media in which four persons were trying to bring dead leopard to some other place. It was not clear in the video who actually killed this leopard and where this tragic incident happened. But the video is clearly showing faces of all four persons who can be questioned to ascertain the true facts.

Islamabad Wildlife Management Board (IWMB) chairperson Rina S. Khan Satti also raised this issue and stated “This is absolutely disgusting and heart-breaking. Killing a leopard and then uploading the video. Stop killing common leopard in Pakistan. I hope wildlife department of Azad Jammu and Kashmir will catch these culprits immediately.”

The statistics showed that more than sixty common leopards have been killed in Azad Jammu and Kashmir in past seven years despite the fact that killing wildlife species has been banned there like rest of Pakistan.

The evidences showed that automatic weapons were mostly used to kill this endangered species listed as ‘near threatened’ by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The wildlife experts have pointed out that influential people often hunt leopards for fun and then label it as a conflict between the local people and the animal. The big cats–referred to as common leopards to distinguish them from their smaller cousins, snow leopards–lurk in the Himalayan foothills.

Adeel Abbasi, a wildlife lover, said “The precise number of common leopards remaining in Pakistan is not known. However, their numbers are shrinking because of rapid population growth and its abysmal record of protecting forests.”