The Persian leopard

Iran lost its lion and its tiger in the twentieth century. It kept its leopard. The Persian leopard, the largest of the leopards, still hunts wild goat and wild boar from the oak forests of the Zagros to the beech slopes of the Alborz and the dry ridges of the Kopet Dagh on the Turkmen border. Its range runs on into the Caucasus, where small numbers survive in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia. Iran is generally thought to hold most of those that remain, and the subspecies is assessed as Endangered by the IUCN.

A neighbour of the capital

The leopard is not only an animal of remote parks such as Golestan or Tandoureh. In the Khojir hills on the eastern edge of Tehran, leopards have been recorded by camera traps a short drive from the city's motorways. That proximity is the leopard's whole story in Iran: it survives where people are, and dies where people are. Snares set for other animals, poisoned carcasses, retaliatory shooting after livestock losses and road collisions account for many deaths.

One word, several cats

The Persian word is palang, and it gives the cheetah its name too: yuzpalang. Older Persian is not always tidy about its big cats. Palang, babr (now the word for tiger) and shir (lion) can shade into one another in classical texts, and translators still argue about which animal a poet meant. What is consistent is the character the word carries. Palang is the animal of the high rocks, solitary and patient, and in everyday speech a fierce person may still be compared to one. The animal itself is quieter than its reputation. Most of what is known about it comes from scat, tracks and grainy night images: a heavy-shouldered cat with large rosettes, pausing on a scree path that shepherds also use by day.