Pakistan: By insuring villagers against livestock depredations, NGO hopes to save elusive snow leopard
KARACHI, Pakistan, Aug 12, 2010 (IPS) - For more than 10 years, Shafqat Hussain has been on the trail of the endangered snow leopard. He has heard the beast’s growl, and has seen its pugmarks against a snowy track. But his dream, of coming eye-to-eye with the elusive nocturnal feline, remains unfulfilled. "If you’ve seen the cat, you’ve seen the Holy Grail," says Hussain.
However, he is not as much "driven by sighting the animal, as ensuring its survival", says the 41-year-old Hussain, an environmentalist and anthropology professor at Trinity College in the United States.
Snow leopards are globally "endangered", according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, with total population estimated at between 4,000 and 7,000.
While the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) bans the trade of snow leopards and its body parts, the wild feline – found only in the mountainous regions of central and south Asia – faces much antagonism from local herders who kill them in retaliation for attacks on their goats, Hussain says.
In 1999, Hussain started an innovative insurance programme in two Baltistan villages, named Project Snow Leopard, with funding from the Royal Geographical Society and the U.S.-based Snow Leopard Conservancy.
"I’m not totally indifferent to the loss the local community bears at the loss of their goats," Hussain told IPS in a telephone interview during his annual visit to Skardu – the capital town of Baltistan, a northern Pakistani region bordering Xinjiang, China.
His "alternate approach", Hussain explains, "helps in the conservation and protection of the snow leopards, but also compensates the local herders for every goat killed by the feline, on the condition that the villagers will not kill it".