Herman, I have stood in front of that leopard enclosure maybe four times and never once read the plaque.
Hannah read it first, apparently, and asked the one question Daniel couldn't answer — leopards? Here?
Daniel's at the Jerusalem Zoo with Hannah and Ezra, standing in front of the Persian leopard, and the plaque says it was one of Israel's largest predators, done in by habitat destruction and poaching, extinct in the Galilee by the sixties. His two questions: did most people even know leopards lived here, and if that thing was one of the largest, what was bigger?
Both good questions, and the second one has an actual answer.
Then let's dig into the forgotten history of the leopard in Israel, and the taxonomic curveball the zoo's own signage throws at us.
The scale of it is what gets me. Start of the nineteenth century, leopards in every suitable habitat in this country. Start of the twentieth, the Arabian leopard was a common sighting across Israel. Common. Not a rare camera-trap event — people saw them.
And now the only leopard in Israel is behind glass in the zoo.
Two behind glass. The zoo just took delivery of a pair of Persian leopards from a zoo in the Czech Republic, and there is a genuine wrinkle in how they've labeled them.
Which is where Daniel's plaque gets interesting, because "Persian leopard" may be the wrong animal entirely.
The zoo says Persian leopard, scientific name Panthera pardus tulliana. That subspecies belongs to the Iranian Plateau, eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, the Hindu Kush. The leopard that actually lived here, according to the literature, was the Arabian leopard, Panthera pardus nimr, native to the Arabian Peninsula including Sinai. Two different subspecies, diverged in the second half of the Pleistocene.
So the plaque might be describing an animal that never lived in the Galilee.
The zoo's own press material doubles down on it — their announcement when the new cats arrived says the Persian leopard was last observed in Israel in 1960 in the Upper Galilee. And every scientific source I can find points the other way.
That's not a rounding error. That's the wrong cat on the sign.
What makes it sharper is the size gap. Tulliana tops out around sixty kilograms. Nimr is the smallest leopard subspecies — males about thirty, females about twenty. The animal on that plaque is roughly twice the animal that actually lived here.
So either the zoo is wrong, or the literature is wrong.
Nobody has reconciled it. The 2004 Tel Aviv scat study says nimr. The conservation literature says nimr. The 2024 paper mapping historical habitat for reintroduction says nimr. The zoo says tulliana, and has a plaque, and now has two live tullianas in an enclosure.
It's remarkably on brand for this country. Everybody's certain, nobody agrees.
Part of what makes it messy is that the extinction wasn't one event. The plaque gives you a date — the sixties — and that single date collapses about fifty years of collapse.
Break it into stages.
Stage one is the north. Judean Mountains, Carmel, Ramot Menashe — those populations are gone between the end of the nineteenth century and 1920. The Galilee holds out longer, and it's being actively killed off the whole time: between 1925 and 1956 at least fourteen leopards hunted or poisoned in that area alone. Then the last Galilee animals are gone around 1960.
Fourteen in thirty-one years is not a species fading out. That's a cull.
Poisoned carcasses, mostly. Plus hunting, plus the prey base going, plus the habitat getting sliced up. The plaque's "habitat destruction and poaching" is true but incomplete — it leaves out the poisoning and it leaves out that the deer and the wild goats they were eating were disappearing at the same time. A predator goes last. It goes when there's nothing left to eat.
And stage two?
Stage two is the south, and that's the part the plaque erases entirely. The Negev population is estimated around twenty animals in the late seventies. By 2002, fewer than eleven isolated individuals. Then the 2004 study used genetic scat analysis — collecting droppings and pulling DNA out of them, which is a clever way to count animals you can't see — and estimated eight leopards left in the whole country. Three females, five males.
Eight. That's a football squad.
The last wild one was seen near Sde Boker in 2007, and it was in poor shape. It died in 2009. There's a sighting in the northern Arabah Valley in 2010 or 2011, and the working line now is that the last reported sighting was in the Arava in 2011.
So the plaque's "1960s" and the reality of 2011 are fifty years apart, and the sign covers the half-century where the animal was actually still alive.
Which changes what the sign is doing. It's not lying. It's rounding. And the rounding is where all the interesting parts go.
What's the regional picture? Was this just us?
No. Jordan's last confirmed sighting is 1987. Syria's last leopard was reportedly killed in 1963 in the coastal mountain range. This was a regional disappearance, and Israel's southern population was the last one standing at the edge of it.
Herman, you said the Negev animals were still being hunted into the early sixties. So the north goes extinct around 1960 and we're still shooting them in the south at the same time.
Same period, different map square. Which is the other thing the plaque hides — it presents one extinction with one date, when it was really a rolling retreat southward over about eighty years.
This is where you tell me about the letter.
Corn, there are two letters in this story. Well — one letter and the letter that never came. Actually there's a receipt involved. I'll get to the receipt.
Take your time.
The point is a plaque is a compression, and compressions are how a country forgets what it used to have. But before we get to how a country forgets, I want to answer Daniel's actual question, because it's sitting there and it's easy.
What was bigger.
Syrian brown bear.
How much bigger are we talking?
A hundred to two hundred kilograms on the zoo's own species page — that page calls it a super predator. World Land Trust goes up to two hundred and fifty. Compare that to the Persian leopard's sixty, or the Arabian leopard's thirty. The bear is four to eight times the animal.
So the leopard on the sign is the wrong subspecies and it's the third-largest thing in the sentence.
The bear is also interesting in its own right — it's the southernmost brown bear subspecies and the smallest of the brown bears, and it was common in Israel. And it's extinct here too. Wikipedia's wildlife of Israel page lists the Syrian brown bear and the Arabian ostrich as gone.
And the lion?
The Asiatic lion was here, and the general view is that it was eradicated around the Crusades, thirteenth century. There's a competing claim that the last lion in Israel was killed in the sixteenth century at a place near Megiddo. Those two don't match.
A three-hundred-year disagreement about when the lion died.
And leopards outlasted the lion by centuries, which is the leopard's whole survival strategy. It's the predator that can live close to people and eat what's available. That's why it hung on at the edges long after the lions and bears were gone.
What else was here that isn't?
Cheetah. Crocodile — there were crocodiles in the rivers. Striped hyena, still present. So the answer to Daniel's question is the bear, but the fuller answer is that the leopard, which felt like the apex animal on that plaque, was the last survivor of a much bigger set.
Larry, you're on.
A public service announcement. Every year, thousands of families visit enclosures just like this one and ask a simple question: where did the animals go? You deserve an answer. You deserve an animal that stays. Introducing Backyard Tulliana, the only residential predator kit engineered for the modern Israeli garden. One compact unit, assembled in under an hour, with a bronze plaque of its own so future generations know exactly what used to be here. Don't let extinction happen to your species. Let it happen to someone else's. Backyard Tulliana. Because pretending is cheaper than preserving.
I own one.
You don't.
I do. It's on the balcony and it did nothing.
Okay. Where were we.
Where we were is the part that actually matters, which is that this animal is woven through the culture. The Hebrew word is namer. Isaiah has the line about the leopard lying down with the kid. There's a 2022 paper in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal pulling together evidence of large predator hunting in the southern Levant — leopards, bears, lions — and it shows the leopard showing up as a symbol in the archaeological record going back thousands of years.
So this isn't an obscure animal that happened to live here. It's in the book.
It's on the pottery, it's on the mosaic floors, and it's gone from the landscape in the space of about a century. That's the thing I can't get past. The lag between the culture and the country.
Which is the shifting baseline idea.
Every generation treats what it grew up with as normal. Daniel's kids will grow up in a country with no leopards outside a zoo, and they'll treat the zoo animal as the reference point. The person who saw a leopard in the Arava in 2011 had a completely different baseline than someone born in 2015.
And the plaque itself is a baseline-setting device. It says extinct in the sixties and the visitor files it as ancient history.
It's not ancient history. It's within the lifetime of people alive right now. Someone who was ten years old when the last Galilee leopard died would be in their late seventies today.
There are people in this country who remember this animal being here, and there are people who don't believe it was ever here, and they're all correct about their own experience.
Which is exactly why the subspecies question is worth not dropping. The zoo is about to teach a generation of children about a Persian leopard — an animal from the Iranian Plateau — as the thing that used to live in the Galilee. The sign and the cull and the receipts are all part of one argument about what this country used to look like.
Understood. Current status, then. What's actually left in the world?
Both subspecies are in trouble, differently. Persian leopard, tulliana — fewer than eleven hundred adults, IUCN Endangered since 2016. Iran holds the bulk of them, somewhere between five and eight hundred. Pakistan a hundred and thirty to a hundred and eighty, Turkmenistan sixty to eighty, and then it falls off a cliff: Azerbaijan under twenty, Iraq around nine, Armenia under ten, Russia six, Georgia one.
Georgia, one.
One. Turkey fewer than five. The whole global count landed somewhere between seven hundred and fifty and about a thousand. And Arabian leopard, nimr, is worse — Critically Endangered, roughly a hundred to a hundred and twenty left as of a few years ago, in Oman and Yemen, possibly gone entirely from Saudi Arabia.
So the smaller animal is in worse shape.
Considerably. And that's where Israel's role gets strange, because Israel still breeds Arabian leopards.
For reintroduction.
At Yotvata Hai-Bar, down in the Arava, they keep a breeding group specifically for the day when there's somewhere to put them. And there's a 2024 paper in Biological Conservation, Atzeni and co-authors, mapping the historical habitat in Israel and the West Bank to work out where a reintroduction could even happen.
And the catch is in the rewilding numbers.
The catch is brutal. The 2004 study noted the success rate for returning captive predators to the wild runs around thirty-eight percent, and for large predators it's much lower than that. You breed an animal in a cage for two generations and it forgets how to hunt, how to hold territory, how to avoid people.
Thirty-eight percent is a coin flip with a bad exchange rate.
And while the country is set up to breed nimr — the right subspecies, the local animal, the one that actually lived here — the two leopards that just arrived in Jerusalem are tulliana, from the Czech Republic. They're excellent animals and they're a real conservation contribution. They are also not the animal on the plaque, in either sense.
You said there was a letter. And a receipt.
You're right about the taxonomy. It's nimr. That part isn't close.
Noted.
But the plaque has a worse problem than the subspecies. Read it again. "The extinction of the last Israeli population in the Galilee." The last Israeli population. Population of what, and in relation to what? The last population of Israeli leopards, which happens to have been in the Galilee? Or the last population, in Israel, of this leopard, which happens to have been in the Galilee? Those are two different sentences. The first one says this was the final chapter of the whole country. The second one says it was the final chapter of the north, and there was another chapter afterward that nobody wrote down.
I take it you've thought about this.
You wrote them a letter, didn't you.
In 1987. I was between jobs, living in a flat above a pet shop near the market that mostly sold tropical fish. The man who ran it was a former zookeeper. He'd worked with the last Negev leopard — the one that died in 2009 — and he told me the rangers called it Boris. Not its real name. A nickname. I wrote to the zoo about the plaque and I asked them which subspecies it was supposed to be. I got a reply.
What did it say?
One sentence. "Thank you for your feedback."
That's it?
I still have it. It's on the back of a receipt from the pet shop. The receipt's dated 1987.
Which is twenty-two years before the leopard died.
That's right.
So the letter you wrote in 1987 is about a leopard that died in 2009, on the back of a receipt from a shop where a man told you about it, and you've been carrying it around for almost forty years waiting for somebody to fix the grammar.
Somebody should fix the grammar.
What did the pet shop man do when you brought it up?
He sold fish. I don't think he thought about it much. But he was kind to me when I was between jobs, and the fish were in good condition. I looked after the tanks when he went away.
You're still bothered by this.
It's a plaque about an animal that's gone. Somebody should get the sentence right. That's all.
The bear.
The bear?
Daniel's question. What was bigger than the leopard. The answer is the Syrian brown bear, a hundred to two hundred kilos against the leopard's sixty at the top end. It's extinct here too, along with the Asiatic lion and the cheetah.
The leopard wasn't the biggest predator. It was the last one.
And the one the country still breeds, for a return that hasn't happened.
Should we do the cutting-room floor thing?
The detail I didn't get to use is the dating problem. One source has the last lion in Israel killed in the sixteenth century near Megiddo. The other has the lion gone by the Crusades, three hundred years earlier. Same animal, same country, and the record disagrees by three centuries. The leopard's timeline is like that, only in miniature — around 1960 in the Galilee, maybe 2011 in the Arava, and nobody can give you a single date that's actually firm.
Which is worth keeping in mind when a sign gives you one.
That's the point. The sign compresses a fifty-year retreat into a decade, and the visitor reads the decade as the truth.
Do leopards come back here or not?
The honest version is that we could try and it would probably fail, and the case for trying anyway is stronger than the odds suggest.
There's a good line buried in your bear answer. The leopard was a biblical animal, and it's gone from the Galilee within the lifetime of people who are still alive.
And the zoo's new pair isn't the same cat that lived there. The sign says Persian, the literature says Arabian, and nobody has fixed it.
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Thanks as always to our producer, Hilbert Flumingtop.
If this was your kind of episode, go back for episode ninety-one, The Story Behind the Show; episode fourteen oh eight, Israel Wartime Readiness Field Guide; and episode eighteen sixty-one, Emergency Prep You Can Sing To. This has been My Weird Prompts.
We'll be back soon.
