Cats of All Sizes

I recently watched a TED talk by Beverly + Dereck Joubert about big cats in Africa. They spent 3 years studying a leopard they named Legadema, Setswana for "light from the sky." How beautiful is that? Perhaps my emotions are running high from all the changes I've been experiencing - mostly overwhelmed with happiness, but I teared up many times during their 20 minute talk. I'm not going to ruin the video for you but I will say it was heartbreaking to learn how these big cats are being decimated by poachers and hunters. According to the Joubert's, over the last 50 years: Lions have gone from 450,000 to only 20,000 today.
Tigers from 45,000 to only 3,000
Cheetahs from 50,000 to 12,000
and Leopards from 700,000 to only 50,000.

From global warming to killing animals needlessly, we have lost touch with nature. But this is something we should easily be able to prevent. How could we, as humans, knownigly be responsible for this type of behavior? In the video, they pointed out that killing one lion disrupts an entire ecosystem. The new lion that enters the pride, kills all the cubs and sometimes even the mothers protecting them in order to establish his power. It's interesting to learn how violent nature is, and in this case - as unnecessary as war itself. But humans are causing that added violence.

Before you lose hope completely, there's a beautiful and bright side to nature - specifically an incident of motherly instincts that we see through Legadema. But I'm not going to tell you what happens. You'll just have to watch for yourself and if you're interested in learning more, you can check out this post via Roar Africa, a company that offers guided tours of Africa.

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf