John R. Platt
March 1, 2012

India’s leopards are dying at a rate of at least one per day, according to a report released this week by theWildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI). At least half of those deaths have been caused by poachers seeking the big cats’ valuable skins, claws and other body parts.

Leopards (Panthera pardus), which live in increasingly fragmented populations in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia,  are protected under Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, which completely prohibits commercial trade in the animals or their body parts. But as is the case with tigers and other species, poaching and illegal trade—along with other factors such as habitat loss—put enormous pressure on leopards. All nine of the world’s leopard subspecies are listed as “Near Threatened” by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources due to declining populations. (Snow leopards, which are endangered, are a separate species.)
According to WPSI, at least 356 Indian leopards (the subspecies Panthera pardus fusca) died in 2011, 52 percent of which were killed by poachers. The organization and its partners warned that these numbers might represent just a portion of the actual deaths. “The cases that we have reported are just the tip of the iceberg,” Anish Andheria of Sanctuary Asia, which helped gather the statistics, told New Delhi’sNDTV. “The loss could be three to five times more because most of the incidents happened outside the forest range and also due to improper intelligence gathering.”

Outside of poaching, 41 Indian leopard deaths last year were caused by conflicts with humans (usually from wandering into villages that have been established near leopard habitats), 29 by accidents (such as vehicle strikes), 21 by other animals and 65 by unknown reasons. An additional 14 leopards died following unsuccessful attempts to rescue the animals from human conflicts, such as a male that died in January 2011 after being caught in a farmer’s wire snare or a female that died in May 2011 after panicked villages threw stones at it while waiting for forestry officials to arrive.

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