Project Snow Leopard saves wild cats

It was a misty winter day in 1998. Shafqat Hussain, an economist-turned-conservationist, was trekking in the high mountain ranges of Pakistan close to Northern Kashmir.

He was at a height of around 4,500 metres and could feel the cold air cup his face.

The air around the mountainside was nearly pin-drop silent except for the stop-and-go crunch of his boots on twigs buried under the snow. And then he heard it - a guttural, long-drawn-out unfurling of a roar that tore through the valley rending the icy skies.

It only took a second for Shafqat to recognise the sound: the call of a snow leopard warning its cubs of danger.

The spine-chiling nature of the cry would have frozen the hearts of most. But Hussain remained unfazed. In fact, his adrenalin shot up and his excitement grew.

He was experiencing a sensation one normally does when confronted with a lost bag of a billion dollars - complete overjoy.

At last, he said to himself, he was close to his goal, a goal he had dreamt of nearly every day for the past many months.

After all, his mission was to track down the magnificent but elusive snow leopard at altitudes that were its natural habitat.

The snow leopard, a rare mountain cat, is extremely difficult to spot. It is highly sensitive to human movement and, with nature having gifted it an astonishingly effective camouflage, a beautiful black and golden dappled coat, it merges into the mountainsides with nearly undetectable dexterity.

But at this very moment, when Shafqat's boots were cracking twigs, the big cat had sensed his presence before he could sense hers and hence its 911 to her cubs.

In Baltistan, a northern area of Pakistan, the snow leopard has a very onomatopoeic local name - kchar.

The name is very similar to the guttural cry of the big cat.

Judging by the nearness of the sound, Shafqat guessed the leopard was quite close to where he was standing.

He looked around, camera at the ready, but could spot or hear nothing except a forest that was settling back into silence.

What should he do? If he moved, would that mean the big cat would noiselesly be lost to his sight, and to his camera? He strained his ears, hoping to hear some sound.

But he heard nothing. Pausing a few moments, his mind furiously weighing the pros and cons of his next step, literally, he took one step, s-l-o-w-l-y towards the source of the cry.

Still nothing. Shafqat began to experience deep disappointment.

He had heard it, he had sensed it, yet he could not see it. "That was one of the first close encounters with the cat,'' recalls Shafqat, who launched Project Snow Leopard in 1999 to save this endangered species.

His tireless efforts earned him the prestigious Rolex Award in 2006. The Associate Laureate prize money of $50,000 helped provide him the much-needed finance to continue the programme.

Shafqat recalls another close encounter with the snow leopard though in the form of its pug marks.

He did what what most people would not have done. He bent down and pressed his face into the indentation.

"I had this irrepressible urge to connect with this magnificent animal ... to feel that it had been there just a while ago.

"You know, the snow leopard has an almost mythical image," he says. His eyes are pools of reflection of the awe and love he feels for this animal.

Shafquat was in Dubai recently to raise awareness about the project and the issues faced by the mountain people living in the shadow of the snow leopard.

Since the launch of the project, he has dedicated his time and efforts to combine a unique livestock insurance programme with ecotourism.

The insurance scheme compensates villagers for every goat killed by predators like the snow leopard, effectively deterring the villagers from killing the offending cat or any other suspect.

He spoke of the project and the requirements and aspirations of rural folk of Baltistan in Pakistan, where the project has helped stabilise the lives of the mountain people.

Mountains have been a recurring theme in the life of Shafquat. "When I was a kid, we used to spend our vacations in the hills in Murree, in Pakistan while we lived in Lahore, which has a flat topography.

But I have always been fascinated by mountains and remember eagerly looking forward to the holidays so I could go trekking in the hills.

"My parents, who were lovers of Urdu poetry and literature, inculcated this love for nature in me. "The Snow Leopard Project is a result of my love for the mountains (and nature)," he says.

His passion for the outdoors turned a shade deeper when, as a teenager, he along with a group of friends, decided to trek in the mountains.

"It was around '82-'83. My three friends and I decided to travel the Karakoram highway that connects Pakistan with China. We spent about three weeks on the highway, stopping
at villages and exploring the landscape.

"When you think of mountains, you think of lush foliage, freshwater springs and waterfalls. But here, the landscape was stark and bare. I was quite surprised at its windswept aridity and bareness."

Although the lack of 'predictable' greenery disappointed him, the hospitality of the mountain people overwhelmed him.

"They were nice, simple and absolutely welcoming. Seeing the vastness of the region, its lovely people, I made up my mind that, someday, I would want to live here."

The day arrived sooner than Shafqat anticipated. After completing his undergraduate degree in developmental economics at Yale University, Shafqat returned to Pakistan to work with his friend at the Aga Khan Rural Support Centre at Skardu, in Baltistan.

"My friend was offered the job but he invited me along and I was overjoyed,'' he says.

"Working in Skardu was like a dream come true. It was one of the best periods of my life. I was the head of regional monitoring and evaluation unit of a rural development project and my job entailed checking on the status of the villages where the project was in operation.

"I would make a detailed report on the plantations, water, irrigation channels, breeding programmes, and so on that were programmed for the villages.''

Working in the area, he also picked up a bit of Balti language. "Since I was there for close to seven years, I learnt the rudiments of the dialect,'' he says.

"I really did have the time of my life living there - I was young, unfettered, fired by the idealism of improving the conditions of people and working in my favourite field of study - rural development.

The organisation provided us with Land Cruisers and
I used to always marvel at my luck of being able to do what I really loved."

While Shafqat was enjoying his stay in the villages, he was also arriving at a deeper understanding of the economic problems the villagers faced.

A majority of them led a pastoral life in harsh mountainous conditions and struggled to eke out a living.

To make matters worse, they had to contend with snow leopards which frequently made off with their livestock. This left the villagers with only one option: to kill the snow leopards.

And this was not acceptable to Shafqat.

The animal was too precious, too intrinsic to the food chain to be dispensed with. Plus, he was enraptured by its magnificent beauty.

With its metre-long tail and beautiful coat, the snow leopard is a marvel of nature built to adapt to extreme weather and geographical conditions. It has been spotted at altitudes of 5,500 metres in the Himalayan peaks.

An extremely shy animal, it hunts alone for wild and domesticated goats and other prey.

A relative of the tiger and the more familiar African leopard, it is one of the least photographed of the big cats.

Shafqat had been studying this wild cat and was keen to protect its dwindling numbers. But he had no clue how to go about it.

After completing the project in Baltistan, he moved to Washington and joined the IUCN, the World Conservation Union. Here he began to understand the underlying issues of conservation better.

"I realised that if we wanted to stop people from killing the snow leopard, we had to first eliminate the reasons they were being killed. The primary reason being the disappearance of livestock, which was the livelihood of the mountain people."

He discussed the issue with Western conservationists and devised an insurance scheme that would serve the interests of both the farmers and the snow leopards.

He then sought grants from several agencies, got one and that was how Project Snow Leopard (PSL) was launched.

Shafqat also launched an eco-tourism initiative, Full Moon Night Trekking. The agency advertises the snow leopard as its chief attraction.

The income accrued from visitors who sign up with Full Moon Night Trekking is used in a novel way to help villagers who have lost their livestock to the snow leopard.

"The earlier government schemes for economic incentives or insurance had not worked well because the government was wary of fraudulent claims,'' he says, explaining the details of the insurance scheme he devised.

"My main concern was to curtail the abuse of the scheme; so we designed one which is transparent and fraud-proof.''

In the past, on average, people in a village in the region lost two to three goats to snow leopards each year.

According to the insurance scheme that then existed, if a goat was valued at Rs3,000 (about Dh200), the villager would have to pay 30 per cent of the cost per head of livestock as annual premium. This was way beyond what the villagers could afford and so few of them insured their livestock.

But Shafqat devised a scheme wherein each villager would have to pay just one per cent of the value of the goat. "A villager could afford to pay Rs25 or Rs 30 per head of livestock as annual insurance premium,'' he says.

The money collected as premium was termed Fund 1 and a meticulous record of payments was maintained by the village insurance committee - a body represented by the villagers.

The money earned from the eco-tourism packages offered by Full Moon Night Trekking was channelled into another fund, called Fund 2.

Now, if a villager lost a goat to a snow leopard, he would have to submit an insurance claim form to the village insurance committee.

This committee would verify the claim, and if found genuine, would compensate the villager based on the prevailing market rate for a goat.

If the farmer had paid, say Rs300 into Fund 1, that amount would be reimbursed. The rest of the compensation amount would be sourced from Fund 2.

Since income from the eco-tourism project was chanelled into Fund 2, the villagers avoided killing snow leopards in retaliation because that would have meant cutting off their source of compensation.

Misappropriation of funds too was almost negligible because all villagers have the right to check books maintained by the committee at any time.

The members on the committee are selected from among the villagers and are rotated periodically. The system has been effective for the last nine years, says Shafqat.

The scheme that began in one valley has now spread to seven valleys. It has proved successful where other similar government schemes failed.

Protecting the leopard

The snow leopard is a very clever predator extremely sensitive to human presence.

Till recently, it was believed that there were only about 250 snow leopards in Pakistan. But recent surveys have shown that there are more than 350 in the region.

"There are ways of conducting an indirect census," says Shafqat. "One method is by calculating the availability of prey.

A herd of 150-200 ibex can support a snow leopard for a year. Based on the availability of the ibex and the markhor (another common prey of the snow leopard) in a region, we make our calculations.

We have also fixed cameras at strategic locations to record snow leopard sightings,'' he says.

Shafqat, who is pursuing doctoral studies at Yale, is keen to bring about a change in the lives of the villagers.

The success of his scheme has prompted other countries in the region to use similar schemes for saving endangered animals.

"The one thing we need to understand is that you cannot undermine people's livelihood at the cost of protecting wildlife," says Shafqat.

"We want to expand to other areas. We should work in 50 valleys, but we are working in two now. I recently got an e-mail from a person in a village in the Hunza valley. He said that villagers there had lost about 25 livestock to snow leopards in a short period."

One of the reasons Shafqat's insurance scheme has become such a huge success is because there are hardly any overheads.

This way funds are not wasted and end up reaching the beneficiaries. Another reason is that local people are allowed to operate the scheme with very little interference from outsiders.

"As far as the governance structure is concerned, we have a very lean set-up. We do not believe in spending a lot of time or money in administrative minutiae.

We have two people in Baltistan, a two-room office with a second-hand computer. Every paisa earned is thoughtfully spenton the welfare of the villagers."

Funds are obviously crucial for the continuation of a project like this and Shafqat is glad that the money from the Rolex Award has come in very handy.

The award also helped create a worldwide awareness about protecting the snow leopard.

"We were really strapped for cash," says Shafqat. "[Post 9/11] eco tourism had slumped and we were finding it difficult to run the insurance scheme in some of the areas. The Associate Rolex Laureate awarded me $50,000.

I have pumped all that back into the project,'' he says. "It gave us a lot of recognition, international legitimacy and credibility and helped us spread the message."

Schemes like this, says Shafqat, face a lot of resistance from hardcore biologists. "Many people believe that conservation
is a very elite term. They believe it to have a Western world-driven agenda.

"The approach now is to involve local people in conservation schemes,'' he says, adding that he is determined to make the project work.

"I am committed to the project. I want to focus on it, keep it small and steady and sustainable."

Shafqat's message

He has a special message for the people living in the mountains of Pakistan. "They should really pay attention to the environment.

Conservation shouldn't be low on their list of priorities. Whatever happens on this front is bound to affect them.

"Earlier, environment was perceived as a luxury the Third World - which was grappling with other more pressing issues of survival - could not afford to have on its radar.

However, things have now changed. They have to come up with local solutions and not look at the West to tell them what is to be done."They can no longer afford to ignore issues of conservation."

Shafqat doesn't see Project Snow Leopard as just another issue of saving an animal.

"It is not just about the snow leopard. If I were so bothered about a disappearing breed, I would create a breeding centre and put the creature in that centre.

"I think this is about our place in the world, the ecological hierarchy and our relationship with nature."

What is truly at the core of his campaign - a deep bonding with nature and an understanding and respect for this relationship.

Perhaps even an emotional layer that wraps around the bonding.

"Mankind cannot afford to live in a bubble and choose to ignore the rest of the world around it. We need to transcend boundaries and live with nature rather than apart from it.''