In the absence of viable solutions

"What would you do," my son asked, "if you found out your best friend was in danger? What would you do if people were trying to kill him?"

My son's best friend is a leopard (stuffed, but real to him). In school this year he learned that leopards are endangered. People are poaching them. People are destroying their habitat. One subspecies of leopard, the Amur leopard, is "critically endangered": in real danger of extinction. Only 40 remain in the wild. In this dinosaur-obsessed household, we know all about extinction.

"What can I do to save my friend?" he asked.

Son, I have no idea.

I did tell him about organizations that work to save leopard habitat; I told him he could send money. I told him about fair-trade businesses and said he could buy things from them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. To an eight-year-old, these are not solutions. They hardly sound like solutions to me.

So we went to the library. Now, Leopard has been Blake's best friend for years; he's gone to show-and-tell at school, he's been to friends' houses; he even has five leopard cousins – gifts to Blake on birthdays and Christmases; yet somehow we have never read anything about leopards. We checked out every single big cat book.

As it turns out, Leopard doesn't have five leopard cousins. He has one leopard cousin. Blake's other stuffed animals are jaguars and cheetahs. (Only a few jaguars are black. Most look like this.) We are now able to identify all the big cats, and we know where they live. We know their characters and their eating habits. We also know that all the big leopard-like cats except cougars are endangered.

Did the books give my son guidance on how to save his friends? Not really. They suggest sending money. OK, OK, we'll send money. Here's some money.

Now what? The animals are still endangered.

I read more about cougars, the non-endangered cats. Their story is really interesting. I'd never heard it before. In the 1960s cougars were nearly extinct in Oregon, so the state changed their status from predator to game animal – meaning, the state cancelled the bounty on their heads and instead charged a fee for hunting them. Then in the '90s voters passed a ban on hunting cougars with dogs. Now, 50 years later, more than 5000 cougars live in Oregon.*

Actually so many cougars live here that it's becoming a problem. So many cougars live here that the Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife has a standing arrangement with the Oregon Zoo to place captured animals. Six cougars were recently killed on a ranch in Linn County – not a ranch in remote eastern Oregon, but one in the populous Willamette Valley, one just 30 miles from the university.

I told my son this cougar story thinking he'd be thrilled, that he might see how politicking can save animals, but instead he only said, "Good. I'll have fewer animals to bring to Leopardland."

Yes. Leopardland. In the absence of useful adult solutions, my kid has come up with his own.

He's building a boat which he intends to sail to the South Pacific, where there are many unclaimed islands. When he finds one with appropriate habitat, he and his stuffed leopards (and jaguars and cheetahs) will then gather up all the remaining leopards, two by two, like Noah, and take them to Leopardland. Where they will be safe.

*This is all in Oregon's cougar management plan, which I highly recommend reading.