Former Edmonton zoo leopard leaves legacy
Shanti died after birthing 4 litters to help preserve endangered cats
The phrase sounds odd, but she was a great Canadian snow leopard — a ghostly feline of Himalayan heritage born amid some hoopla at the Calgary Zoo in 1993 before spending a few years prowling her enclosure at the Valley Zoo in Edmonton.
And when the big Alberta cat known as Shanti finally died at age 20 last month at the Sacramento Zoo — where she’d moved in 1997, given birth to four litters of cubs and become one of the oldest of about 400 captive snow leopards in the world — she was mourned as an “iconic” attraction in the California capital, and hailed for the important contribution she’d made to the conservation of her deeply endangered Central Asian species.
Shanti’s death was not a painless one; she suffered several broken bones, including damaged vertebrae, in a severe fall from a high ledge in the zoo’s snow leopard enclosure. Whether that happened before or after another cat sank its teeth into her back isn’t clear.
“It’s never easy to lose an animal,” Sacramento Zoo curator Harrison Edell told Postmedia News, explaining how Shanti was euthanized several days after the incident when she failed to show signs of recovery.
But he added that, in the wild, “a snow leopard is not likely to live 20 years.” And an animal in her condition “wouldn’t have survived the night, let alone a week” in the species’ natural habitat, mountainous stretches of China, Nepal, Mongolia, India and a few neighbouring Asian countries.
The snow leopard’s extensive historical range, however, belies the profound fragmentation of that once-vast territory by agricultural development, industrial projects, urban growth and other human impacts, Edell said. Though an estimated 4,000 of the cats still survive in the wild, they mostly inhabit “tiny, weird spots, these little pockets where there’s no way for them to get from one pocket to the next.”
Snow leopards, he added, “are not above grabbing a goat or a sheep,” so farmers protecting their herds are often in conflict with the cats. And poachers continue to violate hunting bans to feed a thriving black market in leopard pelts.
“The wild population is very fragile,” Edell said, which means the few hundred captive snow leopards living in zoos throughout North America, Europe and elsewhere are a hedge against the endangered animal’s potential disappearance from the natural world.
Shanti’s success as a breeding female has helped sustain the captive population’s numbers and genetic diversity, the Sacramento Zoo said in a statement, while also serving as a photogenic “ambassador” for wildlife conservation.
“She, individually, played a big role in snow leopard conservation,” Edell said. “Four litters, and her offspring have now gone off and had offspring of their own.”
She has “grandcubs,” he noted, in San Francisco, Idaho and at New York’s famous Central Park Zoo, the website of which currently features a pop-up photo of a snow leopard poster cat.
For a top Asian predator, Shanti had pretty deep roots in Western Canada. Her mother, Katerina, was also born at the Calgary Zoo, and her delivery of three healthy cubs in May 1993 — including Shanti — made headlines across Canada.
Shanti’s grandfather, Cheyenne, had also been a Calgary Zoo resident, as well as the patient in a history-making 1985 operation that saw California veterinarian Howard Paul and UC-Davis professor of orthopedic surgery William Bargar travel to Canada to perform a hip replacement on the arthritic cat.
The operation, which proved successful, was deemed crucial for the hobbled male to mate with a female snow leopard, which he later did — with Katerina among the cubs born to that pair, and Shanti appearing a generation later.
“The goal was to help preserve the species,” Bargar recently recalled in a reminiscence posted at the Sacramento Zoo website.
“Here was Cheyenne, a fierce wild animal, laying on a table with a tube in his throat to breathe for him. I was awestruck. He was so beautiful.
“Unbeknownst to us, the zoo had alerted the news media that a surgery never previously performed on a large cat was to be done on a snow leopard,” he added. “It got wide publicity and soon we were smothered with reporters. This made us even more nervous, as we had no idea if the surgery would be successful.”
But the risky plan worked. And Canada’s contributions to the snow leopard conservation program — despite Shanti’s recent death — are still being measured almost 30 years later.