ASTONISHING AFRICAN ANIMALS
Score: 7.7 / 10 
Leopards
This book is available from the library
Leopards… as far as big cats go, they're certainly one of them. More spotted than lions, less stripey than tigers, fewer gills than trout, leopards occupy a unique niche in the African wildscape. And by 'unique niche' I refer, of course, to 'trees'.
Leopards are almost always found perched among the branches of trees, which led to the mistaken belief among early naturalists that the leopard was some form of plantlife. The scientists of previous centuries were renowned for their misclassification of animal species. The common duck was originally classified as a type of chihuahua. The pterodactyl was mistaken for an early form of gyrocopter. But misclassifying the leopard into a completely different kingdom stands as perhaps their greatest error. Certainly Sir Charles Darwin (inventor of Sir Charles Darwinism) thought so. He is on record declaring it a 'colossal f*ckup that makes me embarrassed to be both a biologist and an Earthling', a comment predictably supported by Thomas Huxley, who added a guttural 'yeah'.
Later, cocaine-free, zoologists rescued the leopard from the Vegetabilia kingdom and restored it to Animalia, where it clearly belongs, what with its lack of chlorophyll and tendency to slaughter and eat gnus. Alas, this was not the end of the confusion, with the leopard being next thought to be a hybrid of a lion and a panther. The name 'leopard', in fact, derives from this very confusion with 'leo' being the Latin word for 'lion' and 'pard' being short for 'pardner', a common term for panthers used by cowboys.
Like gay love-making and dwarf-rustling, the tendency for cowboys to partner up with frontier panthers is a rarely-discussed element of the Wild West era in American history. And so it shall remain.
Back to leopards. It is often said of leopards that they 'never change their spots'. While once true, the penetration of eBay and treetop internet cafes has allowed the modern leopard to conveniently trade in their spots in a user-friendly, financially lucrative manner. Some spot auctions have been known to fetch prices as high as $3.8million Zimbabwean dollars which, for a hungry leopard, is enough to purchase a deep-fry cooker and Atkins diet recipe book.
These financial transactions, known to economists as 'spot trading', have transformed leopard communities around the world. Where leopards were once known as solitary hunters, stalking their prey nocturnally ('nocturnally' = 'with nocturns', a nocturn being a medieval shoehorn), there is now a tendency for groups of leopards to form incorporated companies and float on the markets, the better to maximise shareholders' funds and compete in today's pressure-cooker business environment (the pressure-cooker business being the leopards' preferred industry at this time).
Yes, it seems the leopard has come a long way over the years. But is it truly such a long journey from a kind of leafy branch to the most feared international pressure-cooker conglomerates in the financial community? Or, is it more accurate to see these two states as flip sides of the same coin?
Clearly the former.
Footnote: Other animals leopards are often mistaken for: their twin brothers, jaguars, pumas, people in leopard costumes, ocelots, Ryan Seacrest* and cheetahs.
*Just the one time
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This book is available from the library
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