Aaron,

I was astonished by the lack of blood on the second lion and that got me thinking. I looked around the picture until I saw your hand placement and then it all made sense. You snuck up to him, grabbed him by the balls, and then threw him over your shoulder. The lion wasn't dead! He just passed out from the pain!!!!

Brett

Rich: Those Ethiopia Mountain Leopards are 190-plus. Jason doesn't appear to be straining much, but I can vouch for his raw strength. He's all muscle, no body fat and for his body weight is one of the strongest guys I've ever met.

Aaron: I don't know what to say about you dude. You're just a brute. If I would have attempted that, the trackers would have been calling Global Rescue. Better yet, now I'm gonna have to go shoot another lion just to duplicate that pose. I've never been too impressed by someone doing that with a leopard...but with a lion...that's damn impressive.

Save that for our seminar next year on how to correctly photograph your trophy lion.

I would venture to say that most trophy tom leopards shot these days are much closer to 100 pounds than 200.

As for lions, so few are weighed that in most cases all one can get is a guesstimate - and there can be a lot of "blue sky" in one of those.

That said, there are certainly some monsters out there, including some whose photos are posted on this thread!

Brett - Ya, the hand placement lacks taste but at the time I really didn't care, I just wanted to get it over with.

Moja - I had one of those pics blown up in my booth at DSC a couple years ago. A guy came up and asked how I "fixed" that photo? I told him it was real, so he called me a "liar" and walked off!!!

So if I told you my suni was 47 pounds you wouldn't believe me? Hard Crowd !!

http://www.africahunting.com/h...nvention-2010-a.html

Link to SCI Convention photos, the 21st photo down is Ms. Bowman's leopard leaping after ravens. A huge cat.

quote:

Originally posted by Dave Fulson:
So if I told you my suni was 47 pounds you wouldn't believe me? Hard Crowd !!

Dave, I believe you, if you used the same scales I used on my leopard

There's a "ton" of truth to weight being relative to timing of the cat's last meal. This, in my opinion, makes the whole "What did he weigh" issue irrelevant.

I've just pulled the "post mortem" prepared by the PhD studying leopards on the Save Cons. My leopard weighed 146.61 lbs (66.5 kg) when he was "autopsied" some 16 to 18 hours after I shot him. His stomach and intestines only weighed 13.23lbs(6kg). I suspect that number would have been much greater had he just gorged on a kill or a bait.

So, here is a +/- 150 lb leopard and a 6', 250 lb hunter. I can believe the cat could weigh 180 if he was full of meat, but for purposes of Brett's post, I think any leopard that weighs more than 160 or 170 is a true big boy and a true rarity. He will likely have a whopper of a head too.

Weight, weight, weight!!! It does not matter. When did the animal feed last? My leopard weighed 163 lbs. He was empty. I know that he had no water for at least 8 hours as I had him pinned down, and his stomach was empty as we saw when we dressed him out. What would he have weighed if he had eaten a warthog and topped it off with some water?

Skull size is used as a score for a reason. My 163 pounder scored 17.125 inches. A very nice trophy. In reality, any male leopard in the bag is a great trophy. Like ele tusks. I am less concerned with weight and size than shape.

To each his own.

Like Shakari and Africa 1 have stated...weight for scoring and record book purposes really doesn't matter. But the weight of a cat has somehow managed to creep it's way into the criteria of measuring a cat's greatness. Rarely do you see in pictures or writeups...that the cat had a 17.50" skull score.

It's always about how much the cat weighed! The reason it's important is because the bigger the cat looks in the trophy photo, the better it looks. And we all want to enjoy our photos as treasured memories.

Weight is also important for PH's in determining whether to sit for a cat, i.e. how deep are the claw marks, and how much did the cat feed, so weight does matter in some regards Africa 1.


Weight, Weight Weight!!! It does matter.

I agree Sable, weight and size do help when evaluating a trophy. I was a little to zealous in my post. I guess that I am getting tired of absolute size and weight parameters regarding trophy value. Perhaps it is best to focus on a leopard in the bag. Any leopard is a great trophy.

quote:

Originally posted by manodiablo:
Re: photo of 190 lb 9"3" leopard.

A photoshopped joke. The shadows under the animals
paws and the shadow along the backline do not correspond to the background vegetation (the shadows should vary in apparent distance to the
background).
Also the "hunter" is either an unfortunate
genetic variation or his "hand holding up the
beast appears to be a turkey claw...

9'3" would do credit to an average adult tiger if measured between pegs. Measuring over the curves was a trick done by some of the maharajas in India or their military ataches to gain favour. Some of them even carried tape measures that ran 11" to a foot!! Jim Corbet mentions the method of measuring between pegs. A large leopard is anything over 7' and an 8' leopard is an absolute monster. The world record Indian tiger between pegs was around 10'6". Lions are generally a bit smaller and lighter (they run a lot more than tigers).

Some great cats in those photos. Thanks for sharing.

quote:

Originally posted by shakari:
Forget the weight because it's all bollocks... there's lots of nice cats here but the ONLY thing that matters is the skull measurement.

Everything else is just sales BS and chest thumping.

I have to agree with shakari on this one, Roland Ward and SCI both judge their cats by skull size. That's just how it is as far as "the book" goes. In the old days, they would lay the cat on the ground and "peg" it at the end of the nose and the tip of the tail, and measure between the pegs, then later they started running a tape measure from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail - over the curves of the body. I prefer the latter measurement as to real size. I would say a 7' leopard and probably a 9.5' - 10' lion are decent sized cats. None of the camps I was in weighed them on a scale, so I don't even know what mine weighed. As someone said, if the lion just ate a big meal, the weight could be much larger. 200 lb leopards are not all that rare, and I would think 450-500lb would be closer to being a big lion. I had a PH who told me about a lion on one of his concessions that they saw often that had a HUGE head, but small body and not much mane. None of the clients wanted to take it, even though it would have scored very high in the books. The lion I shot took the Ph, 2 trackers, a game scout, myself and a friend who was with us to load in the back of the truck; it was like lifting a bag of sand - hard to get a good grip on it. The previous day we had loaded a zebra with no problem. PH said he guessed it weighed over 450. We measured it at 9'5' over the curves when we got back to camp. We never weighed it. I thought it was a pretty good lion, but the camp staff never did that deal of lifting me on their shoulders and singing like you see some time, we just had a few cold beers for every body. (Trackers only got one beer each).

It sure took a lot of posts for someone to recognize 9'3" is the size of a large lioness.

quote:

Originally posted by Bwana Bunduki:
eez,

It would greatly depend on the size form the taxidermist used.

Jeff

Well, actually....now that you mention it, that is somewhat true. Cats have very stretchy skins. One of the biggest problems I see on leopard mounts is that the taxidermist makes the neck really thick, there is a lot of excess skin in the neck. My taxidermist said when ordering a form, he usually goes with a SMALLER form! He said he can make an animal look bigger on a smaller form than stretching it to fit a large form by giving some play in the skin, which makes the hair stand up more than a tight fit on a large form where the hair lies down flat from the skin being so tight. It also give the animal a more "softer" look, which is more life like. This is easily noticed on animals like deer and antelope. Of course this reply would probably be more appropriate on the Taxidermy Forum.