About
A live, honest count of the four rosette cats.
Rosette tracks how many jaguars, leopards, snow leopards and Amur leopards are left, answers any question about them from a sourced corpus in five languages, and maps where in the world you can go and see one.
Why these four
They are not four random cats. They are the four rosette cats — the ones whose coats carry a broken, flower-shaped ring rather than a solid spot. A cheetah is not one of them. Each of the four wears the rosette differently, and learning the difference takes about ninety seconds.
How the numbers are sourced
There is no official live counter for any big cat, and this site will never pretend otherwise. Every figure here is a published estimate carrying three things: a date, a method, and an error range. Where those three cannot be established, the site prints unknown rather than a number.
Status and trend come from the IUCN Red List. Jaguar numbers come from the 2018 range-wide modelling study. Snow leopard numbers come from IUCN and the PAWS initiative. Amur leopard numbers come from camera-trap monitoring at Land of the Leopard National Park and its Chinese counterpart. Every figure links to its source with the date it was retrieved.
Confidence, shown rather than hidden
| Confidence | How it is rendered | Example |
|---|---|---|
| High | A solid number | — |
| Moderate | A range | Amur leopard, 130–150 |
| Low | A range plus a grey band and the words poorly surveyed | Snow leopard, 4,000–6,500 |
| None | The word unknown, and a subspecies breakdown instead | Leopard |
Five languages
The whole site, and the assistant's entire knowledge base, exist in English, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Arabic. The assistant detects the language you type your question in and answers in that language, from passages written in it — not machine-translated at the moment of asking.
Update cadence
These figures move once a year at most, so there is no real-time pipeline behind this site — that would be wasted money and a source of bugs. The sources are re-checked by hand quarterly. When something changes, the data is edited and committed, and the site redeploys itself.
What this site will not do
- Print a global leopard figure. No credible one exists.
- List cub-petting, walk-with-a-big-cat operators, or photo props.
- Invent a tourism product for the Amur leopard.
- Let the assistant state a number that is not in its sources.
Where to find us
Instagram: @Dadaandbagg — the reel, the rare facts, and the strangest question the assistant was asked each week.
If you have $50 to spend on this subject do not spend it here. Spend it with the Snow Leopard Trust, Panthera, or the Amur leopard programme. This website costs about ten dollars a year to run.