Snow Leopard Conservancy News

Another Chance for a Threatened Cat

Himalayan B&Bs Honored with Tourism Industry Awards for Protecting Snow Leopards

Among the high peaks of India’s Trans-Himalaya, the magnificent snow leopard can be an unpleasant fact of life for communities whose welfare largely depends upon their herds of sheep and goats. The California -and India- based Snow Leopard Conservancy has been working to transform this conflict scenario into a win-win situation for both herder and leopard.

Their efforts were rewarded when the New York-based Travel+Leisure magazine recently presented the Snow Leopard Conservancy with a 2005 Global Vision Award for Community Outreach, for its network of Himalayan Homestays in Ladakh, India. The magazine introduced the awards this year, to recognize the most innovative projects and organizations that are defending the historical, cultural, and ecological integrity of the traveler’s world.

Travel+Leisure’s December issue, honoring the award recipients, notes, “Himalayan Homestays is an exceptionally farsighted program . . . by putting guests into villagers’ homes and elevating the standards of their stay, the program has created an ecologically sensitive tourism infrastructure – and one that delivers funds directly to the communities themselves. It has also single-handedly transformed the common perception of the snow leopard, from that of a dangerous predator that attacks livestock to an animal whose presence draws travelers and provides important economic opportunities . . . Himalayan Homestays is a model of a self-sustaining–and profitable–conservation program.”

On the heels of that award, the World Travel Market in London honored the Snow Leopard Conservancy with its First Choice Responsible Tourism Highly Commended Award for Endangered Species Conservation for the same Himalayan Homestays program. This award also recognizes companies and organizations making a significant commitment to responsible tourism – projects that make a positive contribution to conservation and the economies of local communities.

Despite Ladakh’s good populations of snow leopards, the cats are classified as endangered over their 1.5 million square-miles of historic habitat in Asia’s remote mountains. These ranges support a diversity of cultures who hunt the snow leopard to supply fur bone to the illicit Asian medicine trade, despise it as a livestock-raider, and yet also revere it as a spiritual guardian of the mountains.

Himalayan Homestays, administered by SLC-India under the sponsorship of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are turning this charismatic animal into an asset and helping to ensure its survival. Rodney Jackson, founder-director of the Snow Leopard Conservancy-US and the world’s leading expert on the species, says, “In reality, local communities will decide the snow leopard’s future. The cats’ value is underlined dramatically when tourists participating in one of the Snow Leopard Conservancy’s special trips actually get to see a snow leopard in the wild. And with the income from Homestays, herders can tolerate occasional predation on their livestock.”

“Villagers wanted to offer an authentic product,” explains Nandita Jain, community participation specialist with The Mountain Institute, co-founder of Himalayan Homestays, “but without missing out on the best of modern technologies. They offer their guests an interesting mix of the old and new elements of local lifestyles. For example, guests use traditional, eco-friendly composting toilets, but safe drinking water and hot drinks are served from solar cookers. The communities’ early involvement in the planning has been critical to the program’s success, and so has that of local tour operators and organizations.”

Ladakhi women – the majority of Home-stay providers – are leveraging the program’s success by investing in their children’s education and putting a portion of their profits into a Community Fund. Rinchen Wangchuk, Director of Snow Leopard Conservancy-India, points out, “Villagers are also taking conservation actions such as protecting pasture for the snow leopard’s natural prey. The herders once asked us why we named our organization after a despised animal. Now they consider snow leopards and the other wildlife of Ladakh to be the ornaments of the mountains.”

While Himalayan Homestays are expanding to other parts of India under the sponsorship of UNESCO, the Ladakh network is the only such program in the world directly linked to conserving the endangered flagship species of Asia’s high mountains.

The Snow Leopard Conservancy-US is offering special Quests for the Snow Leopard that combine a Himalayan Homestay with adventure trekking. Winter visitors might even be lucky enough to see a snow leopard in the wild.

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