A snow leopard was caught on video attacking cattle on Sunday at around 2 am in the village of Hussain Abad, Gojal, in District Hunza, which lies in the extreme north of Pakistan and shares borders with China and Afghanistan.
Tariq Hussain, a local who serves as an honorary director of the Khunjerab Villagers Organization (KVO), told ProPakistani that although the videos were taken Sunday morning, the snow leopard had attacked and killed seven sheep belonging to Amin-ud-Din, a local of Hussain Abad, a few days prior.
Here are the videos captured by the locals:
He claimed that after killing the cattle, the snow leopard fled and that the villagers tied the carcass to the door in order to capture the snow leopard on video when it returned for the carcass. He said that the snow leopard came back with its cubs, completely unbothered by being so close to humans.
Sightings and close encounters with wild animals like snow leopards and ibex are not a rare occurrence in the KVO jurisdiction as wildlife conservation does not allow hunting or killing wild animals, and the lack of fear from both the villagers and the snow leopard in this encounter appears to be a result of that.
The KVO comprises seven (unofficially eight) villages adjacent to Khunjerab National Park and works on wildlife conservation, among other things.
These close encounters mostly occur during the winter due to heavy snowfall in the mountains, which forces these wild animals to descend to the valleys where the villages and communities live.
The extreme north of Pakistan has been home to many households that exclusively rely on natural resources and their cattle for their subsistence. However, these pastoral people have a unique rivalry with the predators as they learn to co-exist because they represent a threat to their livelihood. As a natural response to protect their livelihood, there have been instances in the past when people have killed the beast.
Unlike common leopards, tigers, and lions, the mighty snow leopard is not perceived as a threat to humans, as there have been no reports of any incidents throughout Gilgit-Baltistan. However, the population of the beast, if killed each time it was spotted, would decline to very dangerous levels very quickly.
In order to reduce this conflict, environmental anthropologist Shafqat Hussain has been working to protect snow leopards in Pakistan for over 20 years. He has been helping farmers maintain their livelihoods while learning to coexist with the big cats that prey on their herds.
Hussain is a Rolex Award Laureate, and with the help of the Rolex Award for Enterprise he received in 2006, he has negotiated a peaceful compromise. The Rolex Award helps individuals who take on major problems and initiate projects that offer solutions.
Hussain has helped set up schemes to compensate the local communities for the losses incurred by predators such as the snow leopard and is helping construct predator-proof corrals. Besides the direct approach, for sustainability in the long run, he has introduced a conservation program to try to instill conservation ethics in the younger generation of the local society.
Hussain’s work is primarily focused on Baltistan, but there is also a need for such schemes and solutions in the northern areas of Gilgit, where the communities lose cattle to predators on a regular basis throughout the year without receiving any compensation.
Good work 👍🏻