Adopt an animal

I've been wanting to (symbolically) adopt an animal for awhile now but I've been having the toughest time deciding on which animal to adopt. You have no idea how difficult it was. If only I could donate to all of them! But I made my decision based on the animal which could do most with extra the funding and that is the Amur leopard. Did you know that there are currently less than 40 of them alive in the world at the moment? Less than 40 in this wide wild world of ours.

WWF has seven categories for their animals ranging from "Least concern" to "Extinct". The Amur leopard has way surpassed the "Endangered" category and is hovering precariously on the "Critically Endangered" category. They are only one category away from getting completely wiped out. Hovering precariously indeed. When people think of leopards, they usually picture jungle or Savannah cats languidly perched on a tree branch à la Jungle Book style but Amur leopards are a rare subspecies of leopards found in the temperate Russian Far East.

What WWF is doing for the Amur leopards is working with the communities surrounding the living areas of these leopards to stop poaching and illegal trading of the animal body parts. For more information about what WWF is doing for the Amur leopard, read this.

So if you're still cracking your heads as to what you should get the person who has everything, why not adopt an animal for them? If they have everything, they probably wouldn't need yet another material good right? And while it would be incredibly easy to adopt an animal simply because it's the cutest or because it is your favourite but it would mean so much more if you were to adopt an animal based on the severity of their threat level. Tigers (only 1300 of them, all subspecies included, are left in the world), Przewalski's horses (the world's last subspecies of wild horses), Emperor penguin chicks, Silverback gorillas, sea turtles, Darwin's foxes, Sumatran rhinos (only 300 of them in the wild), Mekong dolphins, crocodiles, white-cheeked gibbons and emerald hummingbirds are all either extinct in the wild or critically endangered.

I don't know about you guys but I really don't want to live in a world where animals exist only in zoos and aquariums. It'll break my sorry little tin heart.