By: Kayhan Int’l Staff Writer

    

Death is natural and a certainty for any living and moving creature, whether human beings, animals, or insects.

It may end life at any stage ranging from infancy to youth and old age, even in the mother’s womb – known as stillborn.

Death can never be averted, in spite of the most intensive or seemingly secure protection and the most advanced medicine and health services to try to prolong life.

Throughout the world millions of people die every day, while in the animal kingdom, beasts, birds, and bacteria perish in unaccountable numbers – unknown and unrecorded by whatever scientific progress mankind has made.

Thus, the recent death in Iran of the affectionate Cheetah cub named “Pirouz” which could not survive despite the best efforts of veterinary doctors and animal experts, including some flown to the Islamic Republic from Africa, was something natural and decreed by fate.

The only one to survive from a litter of three cubs born to a mother in captivity through caesarian section, Pirouz was without doubt the symbol of the spectacular progress of the Islamic Republic in veterinary medicine and conservation projects of animals, of the rare species in particular, such as the Cheetah.

It was but natural for the authorities and the public to express sadness on the death of Pirouz, whose dwindling family members are said to number over only a score in the Iranian wilderness – the last habitat of the Asiatic Cheetah that once ranged throughout West and Central Asia to the Subcontinent.

Who is accountable for the rarity of the Cheetah in Iran, and of the extinction of the Persian Lion, and the Caspian Tiger?

The answer is obvious. It were the bestial regimes that ruled Iran before the triumph of the grassroots movement of the Iranian people in 1979 that threw into the dustbin of history the British-installed and American-supported Pahlavi potentate.

If the Qajarids had initially used bows and arrows in their hunting expeditions and later rudimentary guns, it were the rootless Pahlavi father and son, whose indiscriminate hunting of big game with sophisticated rifles wiped out the lion and tiger from Iran and made the widespread cheetahs and leopards, and even bears, into a rapidly dying species.

Even the Pahlavi brat that lives in the US and survives on the wealth stolen from the Iranian people by his family, had in his teen years shot bears, leopards, and cheetahs, and then proudly posed over their corpses for photographs that adorn the palaces now seized by the nation.

The height of hypocrisy is that this mindless agent of the Americans is shedding crocodile tears for Pirouz, and along with mercenaries and terrorists fleeing from justice in Iran and living under protection of the US and West European regimes.

He seems to have conveniently forgotten the photos he left behind in Iran of the big animals he had hunted and posed proudly over their corpses, as well as the heads and skins of the tigers, lions, elephants, bears, and other big game, mercilessly decimated by his notorious uncle, Abdur-Reza, in several countries, and hung as trophies in the Sa’dabad Palace complex.

The Iranian people are indeed grateful to the Islamic Republic for not only safeguarding their faith, culture, and heritage, but also the environment and whatever is left of wildlife, most of whose species have greatly multiplied over the past four decades.