Leopards: Why do we love them to death

" After dark all cats are leopards". This African saying rings heavy since it is the most elusive, alluring and mysterious creature often referred to as an allegory for perfection in natural design – sleek, smart, and powerful. I am drawn to it, captivated by it and hypnotized by it. My love for the leopard began with my first visit to Kruger Park in 1995. Since then I have been trying to photograph them all across east, central and southern Africa.

Early one morning before dawns light, while driving through dense jungle near the Cameroon border with Congo (DRC) in 2016, I observed a leopard emerge from nowhere, stare at the vehicle and disappear in a flash. Soon thereafter my driver started talking about murderous leopard cults that existed in West Africa. The Leopard Society, also called "Anyoto Aniota", was a West African secret society active in the early- to mid-20th century that practiced cannibalism. They were centered in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, and Nigeria.
Members would dress in leopard skins, waylaying travelers with sharp claw-like weapons in the form of leopards' claws and teeth. The clubs they carried were designed to leave 'foot print' marks on the ground. The victims' flesh would be cut from their bodies and distributed to members of the secret society. They believed that the ritual cannibalism would strengthen both members of the secret society as well as their entire tribe.
Encounters with what is to be believed to be the survival of " The Leopard Society "into the post colonial era is described at length by David Macintosh in "Travels in the white man's grave: memoirs from West and Central Africa".

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I recently laid my hands on "Tarzan and the Leopard Men:" written by Edgar Rice Burroughs and the comic series "Tin Tin in Congo" by Herge , both of whom refer to the leopard men in their stories written in the 1930s, since it was a popular news item in Europe then.
The leopard has been venerated by powerful rulers of the past and present. I inspected the Alexander II (Seleceus) coin in my collection which revealed the emperor wearing a leopard skin helmet. The first King of the Babylonians, Nimrod, whose name means" Leopard subduer", was often depicted wearing a garment of leopard skin. The priests of Bacchus, the Egyptian High Priest of Osiris, had to be clothed in leopard skin. A golden head of a leopard was buried with King Tutankhamen which I had the opportunity to see in Cairo museum a few decades earlier. Modern rulers like Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire sported leopard hats and capes.

The leopard has been a highly totemic representative for many African tribes for millennia. Totemism, is system of belief in which humans are said to have a mystical relationship with a spirit-being, such as an animal Such animal totems were prevalent among ancient hunter- gatherer shamanistic societies like American Indians ( both North and South), African tribal societies and Asian shamanistic cultures found in Siberia and Central Asia.
In 2015 I returned to Kruger where I photographed some amazing leopards in the Sabi Sands area. However, I sadly discovered that the leopard population of South Africa is currently threatened. Leopard-skin coats were legal for many years and are still sold secretly. Many trees in leopard habitats have been cut down for building projects. Because leopards prey on livestock, ranchers trying to protect their animals frequently poison the large cats. All leopard subspecies; African, Indian, Persian, Sri Lankan and Indo-Chinese are either endangered or threatened.
Scott Ramsay of Love Wild Africa (LWA), a photojournalist documenting protected areas, national parks and nature reserves in Africa laments the loss of leopard habitats in his blog. He mentions that leopards are in danger of being wiped out in many areas of the continent – partly because of uncontrolled hunting, but also because of traditional cultures which use the leopard skin as ceremonial attire. He further indicates that roughly 50,000 leopards were being killed every year to fuel this demand.

Leopards' skins are a symbol of pride and royalty in the Shembe religion ( Nazareth Baptist Church), which was founded a century ago in the eastern KwaZulu-Natal region and has roots in Christianity and Zulu customs. Zulu people revere leopards, and consider it a totem animal with special powers. Several high-profile individuals, including President Jacob Zuma and King Goodwill Zwelithini wear real leopard skins to traditional ceremonial events.

In 2004 South Africa introduced, the Biodiversity Act, aimed at saving endangered species like the leopard, that adds an even higher level of protection than the CITES convention on International Trade in Endangered species, an international treaty established in 1973.
Yet the law means little to a cultural group that has valued leopard skins for over a century. “Each one of these millions of worshippers is quite fond of leopard skins,’ says Tristan Dickerson, a leopard researcher for conservation organization Panthera. ‘Such demand is clearly not so good for the conservation of leopards.’
The religion has more than five million members, tens of thousands of whom flock to a special service every January at which older men move to the rhythmic sound of drumbeats and low trumpets.Participants must wear the colourful ceremonial dress, which includes a loincloth of monkey tails, a leopard skin belt, elaborate headgear with ostrich feathers, and above all a cape of leopard skin slung across their chests.
"This is the biggest display of illegal wildlife contraband on Earth," said Guy Balme, Africa leopard programme director with the US-based conservation group Panthera.
Balme estimates – based on research with other leopard experts around Africa – that in the last 100 years, the species has disappeared from 40% of its traditional range. It is estimated only 5000 of the 700,000 African leopards are extant in South Africa.
In South Africa, where wildlife and livestock farming is big business, a leopard can cause much damage. It’s estimated that 68% of suitable leopard habitat is found outside of protected areas in South Africa. This means leopards regularly come into contact with farmers, communities and urban areas, where they pose real threats.
Despite the crash in leopard numbers, CITES still allows for about 2 000 leopards to be hunted for sport across 13 African states every year. In Tanzania and Zimbabwe, 500 leopards are on quota.

Early in February of this year I was driving from Masai Mara to Tsavo in Kenya in search of leopards and wondering about their health among sub saharan Africa's fastest growing population. I was fortunate to photograph at least 6 leopards within a span of 10 days, some of which are shown in this article. While their habitat is well preserved in the National parks and other protected areas, they are disappearing rapidly in populated areas primarily due to poisoning to protect livestock, poaching for fur trade and unregulated trophy hunting. Recently US President Trump's sons were ridiculed for the trophy hunting of leopards in Zimbabwe.
We humans certainly love the leopard to death. But many solutions are being worked out to conserving the leopard. African Wildlife Foundation (AWF) works closely with pastoralist communities to institute preventative measures to protect livestock from predation. In Tanzania, AWF is building bomas for communities living in close proximity to carnivores. Bomas are predator-proof enclosures where livestock are kept to prevent their attack. By taking proactive steps, they are able to prevent both livestock and carnivore deaths.
AWF believes that the key to ensuring the future of the leopard lies in an integrated approach to conservation that looks not only at the species itself, but at the needs of local people, land use, and the ecosystem as a whole. This approach to conservation led AWF to launch the Greater Kruger Leopard Conservation Science Project in South Africa. AWF researchers have placed GPS collars on leopards to study their populations, evaluate resource competition with other carnivores, and study leopard interactions with people.
Christopher Torchia of Associated Press in January 2017 reported new developments that are reducing the Zulu church's dependency of leopard furs. In this year's Shemebe dance ritual, at least 1,200 men in ceremonial attire danced wearing a mix of hides of illegally hunted leopards and Chinese-made, spotted capes designed by conservationists to reduce demand for the real thing. While the replica pelts, called "amambatha," have been distributed for free or a small levy, vendors near the dance site were selling real leopard skins for about $370, as well as the tails of monkeys, genets and serval cats worn by dancers, often around the waist. A few skins of cheetahs, another imperiled species, were also on display.

The imitation leopard skins, besides being a free or cheap alternative to the real item, are more durable in the rain. The mock versions generally look shinier and neater than their real counterparts, which need to be replaced after about a decade.
Learning about fashion was a challenge for Panthera's "Furs for Life" project, which modeled imitations on a haul seized from a poacher and used a complex weave technology that wasn't available in Africa.

"We took those skins, we photographed them, we then digitized them into the pixels that the machine needs and then we sent that into the factories to try and make it exactly as that original fur," said Tristan Dickerson, the project manager.
Worn by everyone from royalty to rock stars for over thousands of years, the love for real leopard skin has been supplanted by prints in the western societies. Leopard print has been both valued as luxurious and sophisticated and dismissed as kitschy and trashy. According to writer and entertainer Jo Weldon, the 20th-century vogue for leopard print in the west started in the 1920s with the rise of mass-produced fashions inspired by movie stars like Joan Crawford and fashion houses like Christian Dior. Over the past century, leopard has fluctuated from a sign of taste and wealth to its utter opposite, as fictional characters like Peg Bundy in the 1980s and '90s demonstrate in Married with Children, an American sitcom. Currently, wearing the print can be approached with so much caution that Forbes dedicated a column to the burning question “Can I Wear Leopard Print to the Office?” .(Short answer: yes, but “you just need to tread carefully.”). The American comedienne Lily Tomlin once quipped "There's so much plastic in this culture that vinyl leopard skin is becoming an endangered synthetic."

Weldon also notes that the great cats themselves serve as inspiration for some people who wear the print. She explains that many women continue to find leopard print attractive and daring because “the pattern designed to help these dangerous animals blend in was one that a woman used to stand out. She's not necessarily saying that she is a predator, but she sure isn't prey.”

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This article was written for Forbes Woman Africa by Ramdas Iyer and published in April 2017
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