American Environmentalists Helping Iran Save the Asiatic Cheetah

America and Iran may not get along politically, but that isn’t stopping environmentalists in both countries from coming together with a common goal: saving the Asiatic cheetah, a beautiful animal on the brink of extinction. Fewer than 100 remain in the deserts of central Iran. Iran’s department of Environment has now teamed up with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to trap and track the cheetahs before they’re gone forever.

From Times Online:

In his recent tours of the Middle East, President Bush urged America’s allies to isolate Iran over its nuclear programme, saying that the safety of the world was at stake.

But the safety of the cheetahs appears to have trumped such concerns. Researchers say that the animals, also known as Iranian cheetahs, once roamed between the Arabian peninsula and India, thriving in the arid, rugged landscape.

After the Iranian Revolution of 1979 the cheetah and its principal prey, gazelles, were hunted, causing their numbers to dwindle dangerously low.

As worked up as Bush is over Iran, let’s hope his administration doesn’t hear about this – they’d just firebomb the cheetahs and use that as a catalyst to start a war.

Link [Times Online]
Photo credit: I.R.Iran DOE/CACP/WCS/UNDP-GEF

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