You’ve heard of the Exmoor Beast, a big cat rumoured to live wild on the heath and stalk sheep. But the chances are you’ve never heard of an even more extraordinary phenomenon – the Snow Leopards of Welwyn Garden City.
In a ramshackle complex behind a farm shop, run by a private charity called the Cat Survival Trust, nine snow leopards are being cared for and encouraged to breed.
And in an ambitious project to save the species from extinction, their cubs will be released into the wild – not in north London, luckily, but at the charity’s nature reserve in the Himalayan province of Sikkim, in India.
Snow leopards are perhaps the most beautiful of all cats. They have thick fur and long tails they can wrap right around their bodies, like woolly scarves.
Adrian Cale's series for the Animal Planet channel, the Snow Leopards Of Leafy London, begins on Monday
‘Basically, they’re big balls of fluff – with teeth,’ says film-maker Adrian Cale, who’s spent 16 months at the Hertfordshire conservation site. His series for the Animal Planet channel, the Snow Leopards Of Leafy London, begins on Monday.
Footage of snow leopards has been rare until now. A sequence in David Attenborough’s 2006 series Planet Earth, showing one hunting a wild deer in north-west Pakistan, famously cost the camera crew months of patient waiting. But now their unique behaviour is there for all to see.
‘We’ve got things people have never witnessed before,’ says Adrian. ‘Scent-marking, courting, fighting – all up close and personal.’
In the wild, snow leopards rarely see each other unless a female is in season – with just 5,000 of them left in the world, it’s not hard for them to avoid a crowd. But in captivity, the cats can become affectionate, even gregarious. One pair, Shen and Sharma, born in the same litter of cubs, are inseparable.
They eat together, play together and snuggle together while sleeping. Others, like the centre’s oldest snow leopards, a 14-year-old breeding pair called Kamal and Urbis, behave like a happily married couple. Dr Terry Moore, founder of the trust, says, ‘They’re devoted to each other, and perhaps a few humans could learn from it.’
In the wild, snow leopards rarely see each other
unless a female is in season - with just 5,000 of them left in the
world, it's not hard for them to avoid a crowd
A burly man with a white, bushy beard, Terry first became concerned about the plight of endangered cats after seeing a civet on sale in Harrods. He bought it, and in 1976 set up his charity to rescue wild cats that could no longer be looked after by private owners or zoos. He currently has nine snow leopards, three pumas, two Amur leopards and a jaguar, among others.
Terry has a rapport with the animals that will amaze viewers. He strolls fearlessly around their cages armed with only a stiff-bristled broom – not so much for fending them off as for giving a friendly belly-rub. ‘The relationship you can build with a cat is, in many ways, often stronger than that you can build with a human,’ he says.
‘They have nothing to fear from you and you have nothing to fear from them.’ He is so at home that he’ll sit and read a book in a cage with his favourite, a male called Cato who is blind in one eye and who Terry reared from a cub. If Cato feels like getting attention, he’ll come and lay his head in Terry’s lap, over the pages – a trick pet owners will recognize.
It’s hard to believe anyone could want to harm such magnificent animals, but the truth is that poachers – who’ve long hunted tigers for the supposed ‘medicinal powers’ of their teeth and ground bones – have now started killing snow leopards.
So it’s crucial Terry’s long-term plans for the Sikkim reserve go ahead. But he’s never prepared to compromise, and that means keeping his Welwyn centre private – viewers will be disappointed to learn that members of the public cannot pay to visit. But one visitor does drop by every February when the females are in heat.
Amazingly, Terry says it’s another big cat. ‘We’ve seen leopard tracks outside the cages three years running,’ he says. ‘Somewhere around here, probably hunting rabbits and lambs, there’s a leopard – not one of ours!’ Maybe there’s more to those tales of beasts on Exmoor...
Snow Leopards Of Leafy London, Monday, 8pm, Animal Planet.
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