An ounce of prevention : snow leopard crime revisited

Snow leopard poaching and trafficking – referred to herein as snow leopard crime – is revisited 13 years after TRAFFIC’s first report on the subject, Fading Footprints: The Killing and Trade of Snow Leopards. This report builds on a preliminary analysis published in May 2016 (Maheshwari and von Meibom, 2016). It addresses a major information gap concerning the linkage between retaliatory killing for livestock depredation and poaching for trade, and the scale at which both are taking place. The focus is on 12 snow leopard range countries: Afghanistan, Bhutan, China, India, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. There is little evidence of illegal trade in snow leopards outside these countries.