LONDON, United Kingdom (Reuters) — A fifth big cat was spotted in London’s Trafalgar Square on Wednesday (March 8).
Perched atop an inspection box near the four iconic bronze lion statues was an animatronic leopard, placed there to highlight the plight of the species.
The 50kg, 1.3 meter long robot named ‘Lily’ was designed by animatronics expert John Nolan and his team. Nolan said the leopard lookalike took fifteen people and several weeks to build.
“It took five weeks to build, so it’s quite a rushed one but we wanted to get it out for Big Cat Week to raise awareness for the fact that these animals are roaming the streets in places like Mumbai, ’cause we’re taking up to 90 per cent of their natural habitat, so a really good cause, and then what better to spread the word with the use of a robot?” he said.
The leopard has over 40 moving parts and is controlled via remote by three operators. It can’t walk, but it can roar, blink and twitch its tail.
Nolan said the most difficult part of bringing the big cat to life was creating its coat.
“I think one of the hardest things though was the spots, because I don’t know what your handwriting was like at school but you know if you don’t have lines and you’re writing, I used to veer off to the right and lose the pattern you know. It’s the same with this, with the spots, we had to create like a stretchy stencil, we took the markings off the internet off a photograph of a rug, and every individual spot has been placed perfectly through the use of a stretchy stencil and airbrushed through,” he said.
Event organizers said Lily’s trip to Trafalgar Square mirrored the lives of real leopards in places like Mumbai, where they are increasingly forced to co-exist with humans.
A press release from the Nat Geo WILD channel, which was behind the stunt, said leopards are facing up to 90 per cent territory loss in some areas around the world.
They are found across Africa and Asia and have typically been regarded as one of the most adaptable of the big cat species.
Research led by The Institute of Zoology’s AP Jacobson published in PeerJ in 2016 revealed that several sub-species of leopards are now critically endangered, with those in Asia threatened by a loss of range of up to 87 percent.
“The stunt that they put on today is to highlight exactly what not only leopards but in fact all species of wild cat are now facing in the wild, and that what we are seeing is as habitat across the world continues to disappear, and more pressure is being put on species of wildlife including all of the cats, we’re seeing more incidents of human wildlife conflict on a daily basis,” said Giles Clark, Managing Director of the Big Cat Sanctuary.
Though Clark’s career has been spent working alongside real big cats, he said Lily was “pretty realistic”.
“Put it this way I wouldn’t want to bump into her in a dark alley,” he added.
The stunt was created by Nat Geo WILD for Big Cat Week, a weeklong series of programs with a feline focus running until March 12.