In his opening remarks, Sergei Ivanov announced that a pair of leopards at the Sochi National Park nursery had produced offspring, which will serve as the basis rehabilitating the Persian leopard, whose habitat was completely destroyed in the 1920s and 1930s.
The programme for rehabilitating the Persian leopard in the Western Caucasus was initiated by Vladimir Putin in 2009 and is being implemented by the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment with participation by Sochi National Park, the Caucasus Nature Reserve, the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Ecology and Evolution, the World Wildlife Fund and the Moscow Zoo.