Pipeline threatens world's rarest cat with extinction

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Pipeline threatens world's rarest cat with extinction
By Andrew Osborn in Moscow
Published: 19 July 2005

Poachers and man-made forest fires have reduced their number to as little as 30 but now the Amur leopard, one of the world's most endangered species, has a new enemy: Russian oil.

Moscow plans to build the world's longest pipeline, with an oil terminal in the last remaining place where the Amur leopard still roams. In China and North Korea, where the leopards were hunted for use in medicines or for their fur, they are officially extinct, but in Russia's far east the big cats have somehow managed to cling on. That could soon change, for the proposed pipeline will run within yards of Russia's oldest nature reserve, Kedrovaya Pad, which was founded in 1916 specifically to safeguard the leopard and other rare species.

Moscow's plan envisages building an oil terminal, a refinery, a rail route, a road network and 18 enormous oil storage tanks at Perevoznaya on the Amur Bay, which is famous for its unspoilt environment.

"This route will almost certainly result in the extinction of the Amur leopard," says the Amur Leopard and Tiger Alliance, which is fighting the plan.

http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article300062.ece