There’s a lot of information about rare cats both large and small, and lots of photos too, including some photos of young “twin” pumas in a jungle (maybe surprising to some people who think of pumas as a temperate North American animal).

I love clouded leopards. I’m fascinated by the ways in which they resemble some ancient types of sabertoothed cats. I saw a trail-cam photo somewhere, a few years back, of a black clouded leopard. I don’t recall where I saw it; it was in a magazine but I have been unable to find it in a google search. I think that one was in Borneo too, but I’m not positive.

DWA, I also get disgusted when I hear industry types crowing about the animals surviving despite years of hunting and habitat destruction. Where I live, there are ads running all the time, on every channel, extolling the “benefits to wildlife” of mountaintop removal strip mining. The bigshots at the major coal company, which is in turn owned by the world’s biggest oil company, are having a field day. Sadly, now that gas prices have gone so high, I have no doubt that mountaintop removal mining will not only continue, but accelerate.

So very little is known about Clouded Leopards in the wild. Maybe this new evidence will spur some extended field studies. The more that is learned about theirs habits, the more likely it is that programs can be designed to protect them in their own habitat.

Good show.

No kidding. And not necessarily by leopards.

Hearing pro-industry types crowing about how wrong environmentalists have been - look, there are animals all over the place now! - is, for me, just as annoying as hearing every uptick of one-tenth of a degree anwhere pronounced as global-warming doom on the way. Fact is, humans gobble habitat. Seeing an animal somewhere it hasn’t been before can be good (hey, they’re pretty adaptable!) or bad (hey, they don’t have anywhere else to go).

We don’t know.