Snow Leopard Review

Since everyone else is at it.....

Although the Snow Leopard is named after the Leopard, it is a significant forking of the DNA code (in fact being closer to the Tiger), and is thus called Panthera Uncia, rather than Panthera Pardus, being uniquely adapted for operating in cold, high altitude environments. From Wikipedia:

Snow leopards are smaller than the other big cats but like them, exhibit a range of sizes, generally weighing between 27 and 54 kilograms (60 and 120 lb). Body length ranges from 75 to 130 centimetres (30 to 50 in), with a tail of nearly the same length.

Snow leopards have long thick fur, the base colour of which varies from smoky grey to yellowish tan, with whitish underparts. They have dark grey to black open rosettes on their body with small spots of the same colour on their heads and larger spots on their legs and tail.

This compares to the Leopard and its many variants:

Head and body length is between 125 and 165 cm (49 and 65 in) and the tail reaches 60 to 110 cm (24 to 43 in). Shoulder height is 45 to 80 cm (18 to 31 in). Males are about 30% larger than females, weighing 37 to 91 kg (82 to 200 lb) compared to 28 to 60 kg (62 to 130 lb) for females.

And the other great rosette-spotted cat, the Jaguar (Panthera Onca):

....weights are normally in the range of 56–96 kilograms (124–211 lb). Larger males have been recorded at 159 kilograms (350 lb)[26] (roughly matching a tigress or lioness), and smaller ones have extremely low weights of 36 kilograms (80 lb). Females are typically 10–20% smaller than males. The length of the cat varies from 1.62–1.83 meters (5.3–6 ft), and its tail may add a further 75 centimeters (30 in). It stands about 67–76 centimeters (27–30 in) tall at the shoulders

We do not compare these cats with the Cheetah (Acinonyx Jubatus) in this review, which is totally different and optimised totally for speed, whereas the other cats are built for general purpose operation. Snow Leopards have no speed advantages over Leopards, but have been seen making c 15m (46 ft) jumps.

The Snow Leopard, like the Leopard, does not have spots in its rosettes whereas the Jaguar does. In addition there is no known example of a Snow Leopard with Melanism functionality which you can get in Leopards and Jaguars. Melanism is result of a dominant allele and causes the fur to be near black in colour (ie Black Panthers). Also, the Snow Leopard cannot roar due to the dropping of some morphological features of the larynx.

Snow Leopards are very rare, on account of the extreme difficulty of finding their elusive prey, Yetis. To the best of our knowledge they have not yet learned how to catch mountaineers which we think would be a rather useful adaptation in the next release into the wild, and we encourage zookeepers to let them practice on visitors.

(Sorry, naming computer operating systems after the Great Cats is just naff. Rodents, marine micro-organisms or even faraway star systems, fine.....)

There - I've said it - no pussy-footing around on this blog