Obviosly nothing in my previous reply changes. They're just common leopards anyway so they match perfectly in an African themed exhibit. By definition is incorrect to being so obnoxiously obsessed by subspecies of big cats (and not by any other animals) as for being so tricky thinking in if they match or not a geographical area.
As I’ve had to deal with this kind of argument more than once I’ll just regurgitate what I’ve said before:
Species and subspecies are separate for a reason. Because they have evolved, for hundreds of thousands of years, to develop different characteristics to adapt to the habitats they find themselves in. An African leopard would not survive for long in the Russian winter, and vice versa for example.
If you breed animals of a different species or even subspecies together you are, by definition, completely undoing the evolutionary process that has been undertaken by those species or subspecies. So yes, it is important that we respect this evolutionary process.
While parts of this perhaps aren’t directly relevant, I’m sure you can understand that an Amur leopard is not the same thing as an African leopard and that breeding them together undoes so much evolutionary progress.
Just the zillions tons of zoochatters that mention if a tiger is Siberian or Sumatran or Bengal or whatever made me sick, especially when they use the words "generic tiger". It's tiger, just tiger, and it's just common leopard. Or if you want to give importance to a so banal taxon as are subspecies, then at least be concordat and do it equally for all other animals - something that even zootierliste fails to do, as they often don't indicate subspecies for small animals like herptiles or rodents.
Whether a taxon is banal to you or not is irrelevant. And I do think it should be equal for other animals. The problem with indicating ssp for rodents and herptiles is that there has been less research into them and so suggested ssp are rarely backed up with studies. This means that generally rodents and herptiles have far fewer legitimate ssp than mammals and birds even though of course there are a few examples.
Having an Amur leopard in Africa section should not strike you more than a Moroccan or a Japanese great cormorant in an European exhibit, or a Poland common European praying mantis in a mediterranean-themed exhibit.
It’s not the same. With the cormorants, the biomes in which the different subspecies live are quite similar and the same goes for the mantis. Amur leopards live in the freezing Russian forest, African leopards live in Sub-Saharan Africa. Taxonomically your examples are more or less similar (even though as noted above there is potential for two separate P.pardus species) but morpholgically and geographically nothing alike. A Moroccan cormorant could easily survive in Europe, a Japanese cormorant would do just fine too I’d suspect. A Polish praying mantis could easily survive in Italy or Southern France. But there is no way an African leopard would persist in Far-Eastern Russia.
