Is the Zanzibar Leopard Really Extinct?
On most of the planet, a leopard is feared for the obvious reasons. On the island of Unguja, in the Zanzibar archipelago, it was feared for a stranger one. Here, many people came to believe that leopards were kept by witches and sent out to do their bidding, to harm people and their livestock on command. To kill a leopard was not only to remove a predator. It was, in that belief, to strike at witchcraft itself.
That idea helped drive one of the most thorough persecutions of a big cat anywhere in the world. Across the twentieth century the Zanzibar leopard was hunted, trapped plus killed, until by the 1990s scientists concluded it was almost certainly gone. A programme meant to conserve it was quietly abandoned. The island's own leopard had, it seemed, been erased.
Then, in 2018, a camera hidden in the forest recorded a small spotted cat walking through the dark. And a question many had treated as closed cracked open again.
Before reading this article, see if you can answer these three questions. By the end, you should be able to answer all three in your own words.
How do scientists decide that a species has gone extinct, when they cannot search everywhere at once?
Why did the people of Zanzibar come to hunt their own leopard so relentlessly?
If a camera captures a spotted cat on the island, why is that not enough, on its own, to prove the Zanzibar leopard still survives?
Keep them close. We will return to them at the end.
Quick Answer
Officially, yes. The Zanzibar leopard is treated as presumed extinct: there has been no confirmed sighting by scientists since the early 1980s, and a conservation programme was abandoned in 1997 after surveys found no proof it survived. But the case is not fully closed. In 2018 a television crew filmed a spotted cat on the island that may have been one, though the scientists advising the programme declined to confirm it. The honest position is that its survival is unproven, rather than disproven.
A leopard shaped by an island
The Zanzibar leopard lived in only one place on earth: Unguja, the main island of the Zanzibar archipelago, off the coast of Tanzania. It lived nowhere else, and it came to be there by accident of geography.
When the last ice age ended and sea levels rose, the land bridge linking Unguja to the African mainland flooded, and a population of leopards was left stranded on the new island. Cut off from the mainland, they followed a path seen again and again in island animals. They grew smaller. Comparisons of museum skins and skulls with mainland leopards show that the Zanzibar leopard was noticeably reduced in size, with a coat pattern of smaller, more broken rosettes. This is how we know it was distinctive at all: not from living animals, which are extremely difficult to study, but from the physical specimens collected before it vanished from view.
The leopard that became a witch's familiar
What happened next is unusual in the story of large cats, and it is central to the mystery.
On Unguja, a widespread belief took hold that leopards were the servants of witches, kept and sent to attack people and property. Researchers Martin Walsh and Helle Goldman, who have studied the animal and its place in island culture more closely than anyone, have documented how this belief turned the leopard from a feared predator into something closer to an enemy to be exterminated. Killing a leopard was understood as an act against witchcraft, and the animal was pursued with a determination that ordinary predator control rarely reaches.
By the second half of the twentieth century this pressure was intense, and in the mid 1990s it was formalised in a government backed campaign against the island's leopards. We know the shape of this history from ethnographic fieldwork, official records plus interviews with the hunters and officials involved. It is a rare and sobering example of a species pushed towards oblivion less by habitat loss than by belief and fear.
How do you prove an animal is gone?
Here the story meets one of the hardest problems in all of conservation. How do you ever prove that something no longer exists?
The evidence against the Zanzibar leopard is real. The last sighting confirmed by a researcher was in the early 1980s. Local hunters reported killing leopards into the mid 1990s, but those reports could not be verified. When conservationists carried out fieldwork in the 1990s, including camera trapping, they found no solid proof that a population survived, and the programme intended to protect it was abandoned in 1997. From that point the scientific community largely treated the animal as extinct, or extirpated from the wild.
Yet declaring a species extinct is a claim about a negative, and negatives are notoriously hard to prove. No survey can watch every acre of forest at once, and an animal as secretive as a leopard, in low numbers, in dense cover, can evade cameras for years. This is why careful biologists distinguish between two very different statements: we have found no evidence that it survives, and it is definitely gone. The first is what the surveys support. The second goes further than the evidence can carry. Extinction is usually inferred from repeated, systematic searching that keeps coming up empty, and even then it is held as a strong probability rather than a certainty.
The footage that reopened the case
In 2018, a film crew from the Animal Planet series Extinct or Alive, led by the biologist Forrest Galante, set camera traps on Unguja based on local accounts of leopards. Reviewing the footage, they found a clip of a small spotted cat moving through the forest at night. Galante argued that its size, its low movement plus its smaller, more solid markings matched what would be expected of the island's leopard, and presented it as evidence that the animal still lived.
It is worth handling this carefully, because it is the crux of the whole question. The footage is genuinely intriguing, and it is the first visual record of a leopard like animal on the island in decades. But it has not been scientifically confirmed. The animal was never captured, sampled or genetically tested, so there is no way to be certain what species it was. Notably, the researchers Walsh and Goldman, who advised the programme, declined to endorse the footage as proof of a Zanzibar leopard. The island is also home to other spotted carnivores, including the servaline genet, which the same expedition filmed, along with feral cats, and at a glance these can be mistaken for a small cat on a night camera. Later surveys on the island have not produced confirmation of a surviving population.
So the footage did not settle the question. What it did was reopen it honestly, showing that the confident label of extinction rested on an absence of evidence that a single clip was enough to unsettle, without being enough to overturn.
Is it even its own leopard?
There is a further layer that makes the question harder still, and more interesting. It is not entirely settled what the Zanzibar leopard was.
It was named as a distinct subspecies, Panthera pardus adersi, on the basis of its size and markings. But that naming happened before modern genetics, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature does not currently recognise it as a separate subspecies. Instead the population is generally grouped within the African leopard, which is listed as Vulnerable. Without genetic study of the surviving museum specimens, whether the Zanzibar leopard was a truly distinct lineage, or simply an isolated island population of the African leopard, remains an open question. That uncertainty matters, because part of asking whether the Zanzibar leopard is extinct is asking exactly what it is we are hoping survived.
Why This Question Matters
Extinction is one of the heaviest words in conservation, and the Zanzibar leopard shows how carefully it has to be used.
The case draws a sharp line between two ideas that are easy to blur: having no evidence that something survives, and knowing that it is gone. Most of the time, the responsible conclusion sits in the difficult space between them. Learning to hold that space, to act on the strong likelihood of extinction while staying open to being wrong, is exactly the kind of thinking good conservation science demands.
There is a human lesson too. This was not, in the main, a species lost to bulldozers or farmland. It was a species pushed to the edge by what people believed about it. That makes it a reminder that protecting wildlife is never only about land and law. It is also about the stories a community tells, and whether those stories leave room for an animal to survive.
What Researchers Still Don't Know
The central question is genuinely unresolved. Nobody can currently say with confidence whether any Zanzibar leopards remain alive on Unguja. The evidence leans heavily towards no, but it does not close the door.
The 2018 footage is itself unresolved. Without a genetic sample or a clearer, repeated record, whether that animal was a Zanzibar leopard, another leopard, or a different creature altogether cannot be confirmed. The taxonomy is open as well, since it is still unclear whether the island's leopard was ever a genetically distinct subspecies, a question that study of preserved specimens could help answer.
What Travellers Can Actually Experience
Let us be clear at the outset. You will not see a Zanzibar leopard. Whether or not any survive, the animal is, at best, vanishingly rare and deeply hidden. Anyone promising a sighting is not being straight with you.
What you can experience is the world the leopard belonged to. On Unguja, Jozani Forest, within Jozani Chwaka Bay National Park, protects the kind of habitat where the last leopards are thought to have lived, and it is a rewarding place to understand the island's ecology. It is also home to the Zanzibar red colobus, a monkey found nowhere else on earth, a genuinely endemic animal you genuinely can see, and a living reminder of how island isolation shapes wildlife in the very way it shaped the leopard. Walking the forest, learning its small carnivores and its history, brings the whole question to life far better than any screen. As always with protected areas, access and guiding arrangements change, so it is worth checking current conditions and travelling with operators who work closely with local communities.
How POV Travel Approaches This Topic
We do not offer to take you to see a rediscovered extinct cat, because no one honestly can. We begin instead with the harder and more rewarding questions. How does anyone decide a species is extinct? What would it actually take to prove this one is not?
Standing in Jozani Forest, working through the persecution that emptied it, the uncertainty in the taxonomy plus the 2018 footage and its real limits, turns a simple headline into a lesson in how conservation reasons under uncertainty. It also means taking seriously the knowledge of the people who live on the island, whose reported sightings keep the question alive, while still holding any single piece of evidence to a fair and consistent standard.
We lay out what the evidence shows, where it runs out plus what it would take to know more, then leave the conclusion with you. Our aim is not to declare the mystery solved, but to help you see clearly why it is not.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the Zanzibar leopard extinct?
It is officially treated as presumed extinct. There has been no sighting confirmed by scientists since the early 1980s, and surveys in the 1990s found no proof of a surviving population, which led to a conservation programme being abandoned in 1997. However, extinction here is an inference from repeated searches coming up empty, not a proven certainty, and unconfirmed reports plus the 2018 footage mean the question is not fully closed.
What is the Zanzibar leopard?
It is a leopard population native only to Unguja, the main island of the Zanzibar archipelago. It became isolated when rising seas cut the island off from mainland Africa after the last ice age, and, like many island animals, it grew smaller over time, with a coat of smaller, more broken markings. We know it was distinctive mainly from museum specimens collected before it disappeared from scientific view.
Why were Zanzibar leopards hunted so heavily?
Largely because of a widespread local belief that leopards were kept by witches and used to harm people and livestock. Researchers who have studied the island's culture describe how this turned the leopard into a target for extermination rather than ordinary predator control, a pressure that culminated in a government backed campaign against the animals in the mid 1990s. We know this from ethnographic fieldwork, interviews plus official records.
Did Forrest Galante really find the Zanzibar leopard in 2018?
He filmed a small spotted cat on a camera trap that he believed was a Zanzibar leopard, during the Animal Planet series Extinct or Alive. The footage is intriguing, but it was never confirmed. The animal was not captured or genetically tested, the scientists advising the programme declined to endorse it as proof, and the island holds other small spotted carnivores that can resemble it on night footage. It reopened the question rather than answering it.
Can you see a Zanzibar leopard today?
Realistically, no. Whether or not any survive, the animal is at best extremely rare and elusive, and there is no reliable way to see one. What you can visit is its former habitat, especially Jozani Forest on Unguja, where you can also see the Zanzibar red colobus, an endemic monkey found nowhere else, and learn the leopard's story on the ground.
Is the Zanzibar leopard a separate subspecies?
That is itself unresolved. It was named as a subspecies, Panthera pardus adersi, before modern genetics, but the IUCN does not currently recognise it as separate, and it is generally grouped within the African leopard. Whether it was a genuinely distinct lineage or an isolated island population of the mainland leopard could only be settled by genetic study of preserved specimens.
Now, Can You Answer Them?
You held three questions at the start. Before you move on, take a moment with each, in your own words.
How do scientists decide that a species has gone extinct, when they cannot search everywhere at once?
Why did the people of Zanzibar come to hunt their own leopard so relentlessly?
If a camera captures a spotted cat on the island, why is that not enough, on its own, to prove the Zanzibar leopard still survives?
If you can work through all three, you understand something that reaches far beyond one island cat: how we weigh evidence about what still exists, and why honest uncertainty is often the most truthful answer of all.
Experience It Yourself
It is easy to file the Zanzibar leopard under solved, a sad story with a known ending, from the comfort of a screen. It is harder, and far more interesting, when you are standing in the green shade of Jozani Forest, listening to the people who still report seeing it, and realising that the honest answer is not a full stop but a question mark. The island that made this leopard, and very nearly unmade it, is still there to be walked and understood. Our expeditions are built around exactly that kind of looking.
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