Snow Leopard

It's just about impossible to photograph these beautiful Snow Leopards (at the Calgary Zoo) as there is an outer railing and then a wire enclosure that has the narrow bars, not the wider ones. You can't avoid a bar somewhere : ) At least, I couldn't. Such gorgeous animals.

"The Snow Leopard cannot roar, despite possessing an incomplete ossification of the hyoid bone, which was previously thought to be essential for allowing the big cats to roar. However, new studies show that the ability to roar is due to other morphological features, especially of the larynx, which are absent in the snow leopard." From Wikipedia.

"The total wild population of the snow leopard is estimated at between 4,000 and 7,500 individuals. In 1972, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, (IUCN) placed the snow leopard on its Red List of Threatened Species as "Endangered," the same classification given the panda and the tiger.....There are numerous agencies working to conserve the snow leopard and its threatened mountain ecosystems." From Wikipedia.

There are also 600-700 snow leopards in zoos around the world.