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Russian zoos to launch program of releasing snow leopards back into the wild

Hypothetical places of releasing and receiving the species, the installation of camera-traps and monitoring the animal’s movement are being worked out together with the Sayano-Shushenski Nature Reserve, director of the Novosibirsk Zoo Andrey Shilo noted

NOVOSIBIRSK, April 7. /TASS/. The Novosibirsk, Krasnoyarsk and Kazan zoos intend to launch a program of releasing endangered snow leopards (who are among the world’s most poorly studied felines) back into the wild. At present, zoos are setting up a group of specialists who will conduct these studies, Andrey Shilo, who heads the Novosibirsk Zoo, told the TASS press center on Thursday.

"In the programs of the Association of Russian Zoos, we are currently working together with the Kazan and Krasnoyarsk Zoos on a snow leopard program. <…> The group that will be engaged is being formed now. Every zoo allocates its own employee who will conduct the scientific basis. Hypothetical places of releasing and receiving [the species], the installation of camera-traps and monitoring the animal’s movement are being worked out together with the Sayano-Shushenski Nature Reserve," Shilo said.

He added that the zoo also intends to cooperate with the Far Eastern Zoo to release a manul, a feline predator, into the wild.

To date, six snow leopards are regularly recorded on the territory of the Sayano-Shushenski Nature Reserve: two grown kittens born in 2020, a female brought from Tajikistan and three adult males. Full-scale records of snow leopards have been conducted in all main habitat areas of Russia since 2015. Last autumn, the Russian Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment for the first time adopted a unified system of counting the number of these animals. The snow leopard became the second type of large cats after Amur tigers, for which plans are in store to boost the effectiveness of security measures with the help of this system. Before that, rare feline species were counted according to different methods.

The snow leopard is listed in the Red Data Book of the Russian Federation and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. Today, it remains one of the most poorly studied felines in the world. The exact number of snow leopards is still unknown. According to the WWF, there are anywhere from 4,000 to 6,000 species on our planet, and only 2% of its global population remains in Russia. It is impossible to count them accurately - the leopards live in hard-to-reach mountainous areas. In Russia, only 70% of the snow leopard habitats have been investigated, and 70-90 felines have been confirmed in a habitat headcount.

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