The decision comes in response to a legal petition submitted in July 2016 by The Humane Society of the United States, Humane Society International, International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Center for Biological Diversity and The Fund for Animals. According to the legal petition considered by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, a loophole in place since 1982, has seen hundreds of leopard trophies per year being imported into the United States without proper scrutiny by the federal government or scientific experts. In 2014 hunters imported 311 leopard trophies into the United States.

In sub-Saharan Africa, the leopard population has declined by more than 30 percent in the past 25 years, and the species has lost 48 to 67 percent of its historic range in Africa. Between 2005 and 2014, at least 10,191 individual leopards were traded internationally as hunting trophies, with the United States as the top importer (accounting for 45 percent of this trade). The number of leopard trophy imports has remained over 300 per year since 1999, despite commitments from the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1982 to only allow “very few” leopard trophies into the country. In South Africa leopards hunting has been placed under a one-year ban for 2016, as they are at risk of extinction across their African and Asian range, having suffered a population decline in sub-Saharan Africa of more than 30 percent in the past 25 years, in part due to unsustainable trophy hunting by Americans.

From: Traveller24.com