Another study that analyzed DNA within snow leopard scat found that more than a quarter of the animals consumed by snow leopards, on average, are livestock. “We have to look at managing conflict, not eliminating it, ” says Sheren Shrestha, senior program officer for the WWF in Nepal. “Conflicts will never be zero. There will always be losses. ” In the meantime, Nepal’s Department of Wildlife Conservation and National Parks has established a fund to provide compensation for losses sustained by wildlife predation across the country. But these funds remain tied up in government bureaucracy, and the amount received by victims can vary wildly.

The animals were photographed and given names chosen by the local community before they were released, groggy and confused, back into the wild. Zebrong and Samling, three and six years old, instantly became darlings of the Nepali press. The aim was to track the movement of the animals and better understand their range. This data would help conservation organizations estimate the total population in the region and confirm whether the leopards crossed the nearby border with China, which would demand an international approach to management and protection. Within six months of the collaring, both were dead.

The majority of these funds are earmarked for research, conferences, and reviews with little left over to support herders like Dakpa, who arguably provide the largest material subsidy for the survival of snow leopards, in the form of involuntary donations of livestock. Goat skulls collected by villagers after a snow leopard massacred the herd. (Photo: Jigme Gurung) Koma is situated on the very edge of Nepal’s 1, 300-square mile Shey Phoksundo National Park, the largest in the country. In November 2019, officials from the National Park and the WWF placed GPS collars on two healthy male snow leopards, each weighing around 80 pounds.

But numerous community members, conservationists, and local officials suspect that’s wishful thinking. Ghana Shyam Gurung is a Nepali WWF representative and a designated Snow Leopard Champion for the organization. Tall, clean-cut, and careful with his words, he listed off a plethora of tactics currently in use to reduce retaliatory killings: building predator-proof corrals in local communities, providing training and support for alternative livelihoods and scholarships for local students, and funding a fledgling livestock insurance program. The WWF admits that none of these programs is large enough in scope to eliminate the conflict altogether. Another common approach to reducing livestock predation is to ensure that wild prey populations are healthy and adequate to sustain the local snow leopard population. But the truth is that livestock are a key part of the animals’ diet. A study implemented in Dolpa showed that areas with a greater abundance of wild prey actually exhibited greater losses of local livestock.

Some families even share stories of being attacked themselves when trying to protect their animals. Despite the threat of a 15-year jail sentence, retaliatory killings of snow leopards are also a relatively common occurrence. Lacking access to other means, shepherds will lace a snow leopard kill with rudimentary poisons like flea powder or insecticides, knowing that the cats will return later to feed. To increase the potency of the poison, sometimes they mix in broken razor blades, which causes a slow, painful death. The anger of some herders doesn’t stop at the illicit poisoning of snow leopards.

Still, many experts believe that, like many other wild species, the global snow leopard population faces unprecedented pressures from habitat loss and conflict with humans. The impacts of climate change are amplified across the mountains and steppes that snow leopards call home, where average temperatures are predicted to rise at a rate more than twice the global average.

Local conservationist Tshiring Lhamu Lama came upon a cellphone video filmed by a local herder while she was performing field research for her master’s degree. In the video, a group of locals harass a pair of juvenile leopards that seem to be severely drugged. Filmed on a shaky mobile phone, the camera follows a small group of herders as they violently drag the two young leopards by their tails across an open pasture on a mountainside.

“When a snow leopard—or other large predator like a leopard, hyaena, lion, or even wolf—goes on a killing spree, they dispatch any animal that moves until all are dead or lying mortally wounded, ” says Rodney Jackson, a leading snow leopard researcher. “The herder arrives to observe an exhausted snow leopard at rest, with all his livestock having neat throat punctures from the cat’s piercing canines. Hence local people’s belief that the snow leopard is a ‘blood-sucker. ’” Shepherds review the damage after a snow leopard killed a herd of goats. (Photo: Jigme Gurung) Mass killings of livestock similar to the incident in Koma happen frequently in Dolpa, along with isolated attacks when animals are at pasture.

In a matter of hours, Gurung’s family’s entire livelihood was gone. Given the high price of animals, the debt required to rebuild his herd could set his family back for a generation. Gurung is sharply handsome: his angular face is sun-creased and framed by a thick head of long black hair, pulled back into a loose ponytail. When we spoke, he wore a heavy set of polished Tibetan buddhist prayer beads around his neck. He spoke slowly and deliberately, measuring his words. “The snow leopard is a creature full of anger, ” he said. “It drank the blood of one goat and then another, and stacked their bodies like sacks of salt.

The majority of the money is spent on victims of tiger and elephant attacks along the Indian border. According to Gopal Khanal, an assistant conservation officer for the Shey Phoksundo park, the fund distributed just over $1 million to families across Nepal last year, but a very small portion actually made it to Dolpa. As a whole, Khanal admits that the funds “aren’t even close to enough. ” For farmers like Gurung, filing out the paperwork necessary to qualify for compensation from the government requires walking five days from Koma and crossing two 18, 000-foot passes—a trip that is impossible for many months of the year. Travel costs alone can total hundreds of dollars.