and its habits by rural Zanzibaris are characterized by the widespread belief that witches keep leopards and send them to harm or harass villagers. This belief includes elaborate ideas about how witches breed and train leopards to do their evil bidding. With these ideas, local farmers explain predation by leopards, and more generally also their appearance "out of place" in the vicinity of farms and villages. The growth of human population and agriculture in the 20th century was largely responsible for this state of affairs, as people encroached on leopard habitat and prey base. Increasing conflict between humans and leopards led to a series of campaigns to exterminate the latter. These campaigns were localized at first, but became island-wide after the Zanzibar Revolution of 1964, when a combined anti-witchcraft and leopard-killing campaign was launched under the leadership of a witchfinder. The long-term result of this campaign and the subsequent classification of the leopard as "vermin" brought the leopard population to the brink of extinction. However, alleged leopard sightings are still being reported, and islanders believe that the Zanzibar leopard is still alive. By the mid-1990s, the Zanzibar leopard population was considered extinct. In 1997 and 2001, rumors circulated about the discovery of leopard scat, but both samples were lost before they could be analyzed. A leopard conservation program was drafted by the CARE-funded Jozani-Chwaka Bay Conservation Project, but abandoned in 1997 when wildlife researchers failed to find evidence for the leopard. Local wildlife officials, however, remained more optimistic about the leopard's survival, and some Zanzibaris have proposed approaching alleged leopard keepers in order to ask them to display their leopards to paying visitors. Villagers sometimes offer to take tourists or researchers to see "domesticated" leopards in return for cash, but so far none of these "kept leopard chases" has been known to end in a successful sighting. These conflicting perceptions of the Zanzibar leopard's status and the possibility of its conservation have yet to be reconciled, presenting a dilemma that has been highlighted by researchers. In 2018, a leopard was recorded on Unguja Island by a camera trap set during filming of the Animal Planet series Extinct or Alive. Some authorities do not consider this video to be reliable evidence due to the exact locality of the video being unknown, and few reliable sources have picked up on it. However, its author (Forrest Galante) has defended its authenticity. Although the