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Journalism of Courage
Snow leopards are elusive animals and are hard to spot. It takes wildlife photographers and big cat enthusiasts much effort to get one shot of snow leopards.
However, earlier this week, a photograph of a snow leopard, clicked by photographer Sascha Fonseca, went viral across social media.
The photograph, which was originally posted by Sascha Fonseca on his Instagram account on June 17, 2022, was also shared across social media platforms by others.
On Sunday, a Twitter user named Dhruva Jaishankar (@d_jaishankar) shared the picture.
The tweet soon went viral with over 1.2 lakh likes and over 12,000 retweets. Commenting on it, a Twitter user wrote, “What a gorgeous creature”. Another person remarked, “So fierce, and yet so cute”.
https://twitter.com/notnotnuanced/status/1541494803522781186
https://twitter.com/HardSciFiMovies/status/1541365180650618880
https://twitter.com/murugan_singh/status/1541090740830212098
In India, snow leopards are found in the trans-Himalayan landscape of Himachal Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jammu and Kashmir and Sikkim.
As per the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), there are less than 10,000 snow leopards in the world which puts them in the IUCN Red List’s “Vulnerable” category.
In 2019, Prakash Javadekar, the then Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, launched a national-level protocol called the Snow Leopard Population Assessment in India (SPAI) that aimed to estimate the population of snow leopards in India.
