Snow leopards in Pakistan

This is a video called Snow Leopard: Species Spotlight- Big Cat TV.

From National Wildlife Magazine in the USA:

Coverage for Carnivores

By Heather Millar

By insuring herders against livestock losses to snow leopards, an innovative program in Pakistan is helping to protect the elusive and endangered cats

ON A COLD MARCH MORNING in 2000, Mohammed Abbas led his two dozen goats to the outskirts of his village, Skoyo, in northwestern Pakistan. There, the herd spent the day grazing, nosing through light snow cover to the brown grass below. Returning at dusk to drive the animals back to the corral, Abbas noticed that a three-year-old male was missing. Then he found the goat dead, eviscerated and partially eaten, almost certainly by one of more than a hundred hungry snow leopards that roam the mountainous region.

A few years ago, Abbas might have been enraged enough to get his rifle and go leopard hunting. Like 400 or so of his neighbors in the Skoyo Valley, the father of six barely carves out a living by tilling fields and tending orchards in the lowlands and herding goats on the mountain slopes. Instead, when Abbas found the kill, he notified the local insurance committee—and became the first in his village to claim a loss through Project Snow Leopard, an inventive program to protect the cats through a village-administered livestock insurance system linked to snow leopard ecotourism.

The snow leopard, if you can catch a glimpse of one, is a graceful predator, with a luminous soft gray coat marked with rosettes of black on brown and a long tail that helps it balance, doubling as a muffler in bitter weather. Ranging from Afghanistan to China, the cat rules at the top of the food chain in mountain ecosystems that include famous peaks like K2 and Mount Everest.

No one knows for sure how many snow leopards remain in the wild. The cat is so reclusive and hard to track that it has taken on an aura of myth. Based on indirect evidence such as tracks, interviews with locals, and the remains of kills, accepted population estimates range from 3,000 to 7,000.

See also here.

Cats in art: here.