FWD: Snow Leopards Poached for New Skeleton Trade

[Guest guest]

" The areas that we have the most concern about are the Central Asian

Republics where the economies are such that people are doing anything that

they can to get by, " reports Tom McCarthy, Conservation Director of the

International Snow Leopard Trust which works with WWF to try and save the

remaining 7,000 snow leopards in the wild. " We know that snow leopard

populations have just plummeted and the poaching is very high. "

 

Up until now the snow leopard has been hunted solely for its coat of

white-grey fur patterned with dark-grey open rosettes. Their pelts were the

height of fashion during the 1920s when around 1,000 pelts were exported out

of Asia and Russia each year. Although banned, the trade in pelts continues

in countries that have failed to economically flourish after the demise of

the Soviet Union. In Kazakhstan, a snow leopard pelt can fetch a price 60

times higher than the minimum wage. And in the neighbouring Kyrgyz Republic,

the country may have lost as much as 50 percent the number of cats in the

wild within the past seven years.

 

Today the economic need of these countries combined with the search by Asian

medicine markets for big cat bones creates the potential for new trade boom

in skeletons. " The pelts are the big seller right now but in the Asian

markets as availability of tiger bone goes down, then the demand for

replacement bones goes up, " reports McCarthy.

 

" Snow leopards are one replacement that we know is being more keenly sought.

We've just heard that one full snow leopard skeleton was sold for US

$10,000. " Demand for snow leopard bones may fuel more poaching in the 12

countries where snow leopards are found: China, Bhutan, Nepal, India,

Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyz Republic,

Russia and Mongolia.

 

" In a lot of places people are not aware yet of what the value of the bones

are. Five or six years ago in places like Mongolia the primary trade partner

was the Soviet Union. But more trade is going on now with China and when it

becomes more widely known in Mongolia what a set of snow leopard bones can

sell for in China, we may see more poaching. "

 

The snow leopard is one of the few species listed in Appendix I of the

Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and

Flora (CITES) which bans international commercial trade in an agreed list of

plant and animal species threatened with extinction. But Bhutan, Tajikistan

and Kyrgyz Republic have not yet ratified the treaty providing even fewer

obstacles for an increase in trade to East Asia.

 

Addressing the economic needs of local people in snow-leopard habitat is the

key to limiting poaching, as the experience of Mongolia has shown. The snow

leopard's prey - ibex (wild goats) - are often squeezed out of areas by

domestic animal herds as Bazarsad Chimed-Ochir, Head of the WWF Mongolia

Project Office explains: " Livestock in the last 10 years have been rapidly

increasing - before 1990 we had about 20-25 million, now we have 33 million

livestock. There is massive competition between ibex and domestic animals -

this is one major reason leading to the reduction of the prey species. "

 

As numbers of ibex decline the snow leopard increasingly must hunt domestic

animals: the herder's bank account. But the price of this prey is high for

the snow leopard as angry herders often kill them in retribution for their

" stolen " animals.

 

" To reduce the conflict between the snow leopard and herders we have

initiated some incentive programmes for herders. We call one Irbis

Enterprises - an economic incentive programme which sells their wool and

hide products in return for an agreement not to poach snow leopards or their

prey species, " says Chimed-Ochir. In Nepal and Pakistan conservationists

have helped herders build better corrals and are now looking at introducing

better guard dogs for local herds.

 

WWF Int., 25 Apr 2001