Buy fewer books? Easier to ask a leopard to change its spots!

When I was very small, my uncle got sent to Africa by his company. When he came home, he brought me a copy of Rudyard Kipling's Just So Stories - made all the cooler and more exotic because it came from so far away! Kipling tells us how the leopard got his spots, but he doesn't tell us what to do with people who can't stop buying books about spotted cats! This post is dedicated to felines mottled, smudged, bespattered, and adorned with rosettes, speckles, and splotches!

This is a wonderful series! (Their most recent offering is pangolins). I've wanted Cheetahs for a good, long while - but its pricing is prohibitive. I finally found a reasonably priced copy and I'm giving it to my self as an end-of-semester present! 

There's a theme to this post beside the spotted felines that inhabit these books, and it's this: books on spotted felines are expensive! Jawai is not exception and this title only finally made it into my collection because I found a copy for $30 instead of the usual $76! 









The Amur leopard is the rarest big cat in the world. Consequently, books on said rare cat are pretty scarce, too! To date, I've found exactly three in English: Population and Habitat of Amur Leopard in China, Against all odds: the Amur Leopard's Fight for Survival, and Stalking the Spotted Panther. As of this post, I'm proud to be the owner of two out of three (which, as Meat Loaf tells us, care of Jim Steinman: "ain't bad"), having added Stalking to my collection when I found a copy for $25 instead of the usual asking price of $40.

The Snow Leopard and the Goat isn't out yet - but this year (and, apparently 2020) have been great years for cat books! And I suspect that I already know a little bit about what it's about. Nepal has been a landmark country for snow leopard conservation and one of the methods it has employed to save these big cats is compensating farmers for goats lost to predation. Because the farmers are compensated, they don't retaliate by killing the leopards. Furthermore, the local population is enlisted as citizen scientists, being asked to report leopard sightings.