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Article: To Save a Snow Leopard: A Special Afghanistan Mission

Author: By: Tim McGerk

On March 17th, 2010

My Summary:

The article describes a hunter in a valley in the Wakhan Mountains of Afghanistan who caught an extremely rare snow leopard, which is an endangered species with a total of less than a 1,000 left on the planet. The snow leopard was thought to be entirely extinct in Afghanistan. The capturer brought the snow leopard alive back into town and allegedly tried to sell it for $2,000,000. Luckily, The US Agricultural department in northern Afghanistan was tipped off about the leopard and confiscated it from the hunters.

This story capitalizes on the extremely high demand for the almost extinct leopard. In the past 100 years, the popularity of the leopard has grown sky high, particularly in fashion. Jackie Kennedy started the huge trend of leopard jackets when her husband was in office. She had a personal designer who's name was Oleg Cassini, the designer of the infamous leopard jacket, which sparked a fashion craze for women. Since Jackie was a major style icon, leopard fur became high in demand and over 250,000 leopards were killed as women made got their copies of Jackie's coat made. Fortunately, after Cassini realized his creation was leading to the extinction of a species he made an effort to persuade women to wear faux fur, and not real fur, which ultimately lead to it being more fashionable to wear faux fur.