Snow Leopard and the Goat

de Shafqat Hussain, K. Sivaramakrishnan

"Following the downgrading by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) of snow leopard status in September 2017 from 'endangered' to 'vulnerable,' debate has renewed about the actual numbers of snow leopards in the wild and strategies for facilitating coexistence between these enigmatic animals and humans. Evidence from Pakistan and other parts of the snow leopard home range shows that snow leopards rely heavily on human society for their existence, as domestic livestock accounts for as much as 70 percent of their diet. By maintaining that the snow leopard is a 'wild' animal, conservation NGOs and state agencies have put laws in place that punish farmers for attacking the snow leopard, but they avoid engagement with efforts to mitigate the economic burden suffered by farmers whose herds are reduced by snow leopards. This ethnography examines the uneven distribution of costs and benefits involved in snow leopard conservation in the Karakoram and Himalayan mountains of northern Pakistan and shows that for the conservation of nature to be successful, the vision, interests and priorities of those most affected by conservation policies--in this case, local farmers--must be addressed. The Snow Leopard and the Goat shows that characterization of this dilemma as a conflict between humans (farmers) and wildlife (snow leopards) is in fact misleading, as the real conflict is between two human groups--farmers and conservationists--who see the snow leopard differently"--