Snow leopards

BBC Earth has an article (with their usual unbloggable video) about some very exotic beasts:

The snow leopard had been caught in the act. Cornered inside the loosely-secured livestock corral, it had already killed several sheep and goats. So Totisho Davlatnazarov Mubarakadamovich, a herder in the remote Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan, did what he felt he had to. He picked up the nearest available weapon, a shovel, and killed the wild cat. He hoped to recoup the devastating loss to his livelihood by selling its skin and bones. Illegally-procured leopard skins are sold as ostentatious wall hangings, and as body parts for traditional Asian medicines. This trade could have provided a lucrative opportunity had Mubarakadamovich sold his ill-gotten wares.
But news travels quickly in small communities. Local authorities got word of his actions and prepared to enact a hefty punishment. Eking out forty dollars a month as both teacher and herder, he now faced a crippling fine of over thirty thousand dollars.
The herder's plight reached the ears of Tanya Rosen, director of Panthera's Snow Leopard Program in Tajikistan. She recognized his dilemma: retaliatory killing of snow leopards is widespread. "We were determined to turn this terrible accident into something positive," says Rosen. She convinced Mubarakadamovich to turn the leopard carcass over to Tajikistan's Committee of Environmental Protection and the Tajik Academy of Sciences, and to promise to never kill another predator, in exchange for an agreement to waive the fine.
Relieved of his financial burden, Mubarakadamovich was profoundly grateful. On his own initiative, he began assembling others in the village to establish a network of informants, to prevent future snow leopard kills. It was the beginning of what would later become a conflict-mitigation project funded by the National Geographic Big Cats Initiative.
Mubarakadamovich's story is not that unusual. The snow leopard's existence is shrouded in conflict. Almost everywhere they occur, their carnivorous nature clashes with human activities, transforming hunter into hunted. Snow leopards are a cat in crisis.
At the same time, they have a ghostly grandeur. To capture the mystique and majesty of snow leopards, a BBC Earth film unit set out for Ladakh in India. Their aim: to capture footage of this cryptic mountain-climbing cat for a follow-up landmark program to 2006's Planet Earth.
Choosing a location was tricky. The film crew, headed by producer Justin Anderson, had to balance several concerns. "Snow leopards were very much a big star of the Planet Earth 'Mountains' show," says Anderson. Ten years previously, in Pakistan, they had captured a snow leopard hunt on film for the first time ever. "It was a big iconic sequence for the series," says Anderson. It was his task to revisit snow leopards for the Planet Earth sequel. However, nobody knew the whereabouts of the "star" snow leopard that they had filmed before. Worse, the politics of Pakistan had changed radically since their previous visit. It was time to explore new horizons.
They decided to go to Hemis National Park in Ladakh. The Planet Earth crew had filmed there, but struggled to see the cats. Now the area is a hotspot for snow leopard sightings. It may be that the Park's conservation strategies have been so successful that the cats, while still shy, have become more tolerant of people, and people more tolerant of the cats. India has created a national plan for snow leopard conservation, as have Mongolia, Pakistan, Nepal, and Russia.
Such plans are urgently needed. The cat from the roof of the world is struggling to stay alive. Its range covers about two million square kilometers, spanning the Himalayas, the Karakorams, the Hindu Kush, the Pamirs, the Tien Shans, and the Altai mountain ranges. It can be found in Afghanistan, Bhutan, China, India, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Nepal, Mongolia, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and perhaps Myanmar (formerly known as Burma).
Snow leopards live in punishing terrain. They clamber along cliffs, rugged grasslands, gullies, ridges, slopes, and rocky outcrops, in habitat subject to extremes in temperatures, high aridity, and powerful storms. They are elusive, and their camouflage is impeccable. Individual cats also range over vast distances. In addition, a third of their range falls along sensitive international borders engaged in hostile disputes. All this means that snow leopards are difficult to study.
Globally, between four thousand and six thousand snow leopards remain, according to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Their numbers are thought to have declined as much as twenty percent between 1992 and 2008, due to loss of habitat, illegal trade, conflict with local peoples, and loss of their traditional prey.
Snow leopards prey mainly on blue sheep (Pseudois nayaur) and Siberian ibex (Capra sibirica), both of which are threatened by overgrazing of livestock, poaching, and persecution. Radio-tracking studies suggest that snow leopards kill a sheep every ten to fifteen days, supplementing their diet with marmot (Marmota spp.), pika (Ochotona spp.), hares (Lepus spp.), rodents, and birds.

Rico says some things must be preserved, fuck the cost...