The Cheetahs of Iran “Asiatic Cheetahs”

 Tiger Protection Group (TPG)

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Although the Asiatic Cheetah is presumed to be extinct in India, it used to be known as the Indian Cheetah. Today, world’s last few Asiatic Cheetah are known to survive in Iran, which is why it is now also known as the Iranian Cheetah. The head and the body of the adult Asiatic Cheetah measure from 112 to 135 cm with a tail length between 66 and 84 cm. It can weigh from 34 to 54 kg, but the male is slightly larger than the female. Females, unlike males, do not establish a territory, which means they travel within their habitats, sometimes migrating long distances. Cheetah is the world’s fastest land animal and is the most unique and specialized member of the cat family and can reach the speeds of 70 mph. Unlike the other cats, it has a leaner body, longer legs. With its weak jaws and small teeth, it cannot fight larger predators to protect its kills or young. It is often mistaken for a leopard. Its distinguishing marks are the long teardrop-shaped lines on each side of the nose from the corner of its eyes to its mouth. It is aerodynamically built for speed and is endowed with a powerful heart, oversized liver, and large, strong arteries.

► DISTRIBUTION

☛ Asiatic Cheetah once ranged from Arabia to India, through Iran, central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly numerous in India and Iran. But today, it is only found in Iran, with some occasional sightings in Baluchistan, Pakistan.
☛ The Mughal Emperor of India, Akbar, was said to have had 1,000 Cheetahs at one time (something depicted in many Persian and Indian miniature paintings.)
☛ From the beginning of twentieth century, the species was already heading to extinction in many areas.
☛ The last physical evidence of the Asiatic Cheetah in India was three shot by the Maharajah of Surguja in 1947 in eastern Madhya Pradesh.
☛ By 1990, the Asiatic Cheetah appeared to survive only in Iran.
The population is Iran are the last remaining representatives of the Asian lineage.

► FEEDS ON

☛ Cheetahs are the only big cats that can be tamed and trained to hunt gazelle. It preys on small antelopes.
☛ In Iran, its diet consists mainly of Jebeer Gazelle( also called Chinkara) , Goitered Gazelle, wild sheep, wild goat and Cape Hare.
☛ In areas where their wild prey is in decline, they are forced to eat livestock.
They turn to hunting domestic animals because they could not survive on smaller prey.

► STATUS & THREATS

☛ The Asiatic Cheetah is a critically endangered subspecies of the Cheetah. Estimated to number more than 200 during the 1970s and a very few are left now.
☛ Estimates based on field surveys over ten years indicate a remaining population of 70-100 Asiatic Cheetahs, most of them in Iran.
☛ The Cheetah’s habitat is under threat from desertification, increasing agriculture, residential settlements and declining prey- caused by hunting and degradation by pastures by overgrazing from introduced livestock.
☛ Habitat loss from mining development and poaching of Asiatic Cheetah is also threatening their population in Iran.
☛ The numerous constraints regarding the Cheetah’s conservation contribute to its general susceptibility and it’s very complex conservation requirements, e.g., its low fertility rate, the high mortality rate due to genetic factors, and the fact that females are the ones who select mates, have been reasons why captive breeding has had such a poor record.
☛ All living Cheetah have very limited genetic diversity due to a near-extinction event some 12,000 years ago.

► CONSERVATION EFFORTS

☛ Iran’s Department of the Environment, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) have launched the Conservation of the Asiatic Cheetah Project (CACP) designed to preserve and rehabilitate the remaining areas of Cheetah habitat left in Iran.
☛ Cheetah Friends: Another incentive in the region is the formation of young core groups of Cheetah Friends, who after a short instructive course, are able to educate people and organize Cheetah events and have become an informational instance in Cheetah matters for a number of villages.
☛ In January 2010, Iran and Russia jointly announced plans to revive both the Asiatic Cheetah and the Amur Tiger species in and around the Caspian region through a joint project in the near future.
☛ India is interested in cloning the Cheetah to reintroduce it to the country, but Iran refused to send a male and a female Cheetah. Also in May 2012, India’s Supreme Court suspended attempts to introduce African Cheetahs following the publication of newer genetic evidence, which suggests that the Asian and African Cheetahs are genetically very distinct.

Image Copyrights: IR DoE/CACP/WCS/UNDP

 

Snow Leopard Trust

Snow Leopard Trust

http://www.facebook.com/snowleopard.org

While we humans mostly rely on warm hats to keep our heads warm, snow leopards have round, short ears that naturally reduce heat loss.

You’re not a snow leopard, so you might need a beautiful warm hat for the coming cold days. Why not get one that helps save snow leopards? Where? Here! http://ow.ly/fgzkR

 

Panthera – Snow Leopard Program

An article in Great Falls Tribune, “Snow leopards: Love of wild cats takes Great Falls man to China,” shares the interesting story of how Panthera Snow Leopard Program Regional Biologist, Byron Weckworth, came to be a wild cat scientist & devote his life to saving snow leopards. Read it & learn about Byron’s career path & his current work on the Tibetan Plateau to monitor & protect snow leopards http://bit.ly/VrABdn

Snow Leopard Trust

 Snow Leopard Trust

http://www.facebook.com/snowleopard.org

In Mongolia, we host our long-term ecological study that follows wild snow leopards via GPS collars. These collars help us learn incredible details about the ‘ghosts of the mountains’ including what resources they need, what threats they face, and how our limited resources can have the greatest impact

Pallas’s cat (Otocolobus manul)

 Wild for Wildlife and Nature

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Pallas’s cat (Otocolobus manul), also called the manul, is a small wild cat having a broad but patchy distribution in the grasslands and montane steppe of Central Asia. The species is negatively impacted by habitat degradation, prey base decline, and hunting, and has therefore been classified as Near Threatenedby IUCN since 2002.Pallas’s cat is native to the steppe regions of Central Asia, at elevations up to 5,050 metres (16,570 ft). They are found in the Transcaucasus and Transbaikal regions of Russia, and, less frequently, in the Altai, Tyva, and Buryatia Republics. They also inhabit Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Kashmir and across much of western China, especially in the Tibetan Plateau. In 1997, they were reported for the first time as being present in the eastern SayanMountains.

Populations in the Caspian Sea region, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, are declining, and increasingly isolated. In 2008, an individual was camera-trapped in Iran’s Khojir National Park for the first time.

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Snow Leopards Need To Be Protected … But How?

One conservationist has a radical new plan—treating the rare cat as a “domesticated” animal.

A snow leopard in Pakistan‘s Chitral region.

Photograph by George B. Schaller, National Geographic

Christine Dell’Amore

National Geographic News

Published October 9, 2012

news.nationalgeographic.com

The snow leopard in Pakistan is an endangered species. The population of the rarely seen big cat has likely fallen to fewer than 450 in the country, mainly due to hunting. Now an expert has come up with an unconventional—and controversial—proposal to save the snow leopard: Classify it as a domesticated animal.

That doesn’t mean that snow leopards are literally tame, like a chicken, explained Shafqat Hussain, a National Geographic Emerging Explorer who spoke during the National Geographic Explorers Symposium in Washington, D.C., in June: “When I say that snow leopards are like domestic cats, I mean it rhetorically to make contrast with the word wild.” (National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.)

His idea stems from the changing relationship between snow leopards and humans. Where the cats do remain in the Himalaya, they increasingly share their habitat with mountain herders. A 2010 study of snow leopard scat found that up to 70 percent of the species’ diet in the Gilgit Baltistan Province (map) comes from sheep, cattle, and other domestic animals. Some herders have killed snow leopards in retaliation for preying on their livestock. (See pictures and video of snow leopards in Afghanistan.)

Given the snow leopards’ diet, “how do we see these mythical, elusive wild animals? Are they really wild in the sense that of meaning we attach to the word wild—existing on its own, having no connection with society and domestic economy?” Hussain said.

“Clearly not.”

Supporting Locals

So the way to enable snow leopards to survive, says Hussain, is not to create protected areas that sequester them from local communities. That solution often alienates farmers, who lose their grazing areas as a result. He would suggest supporting local herders instead so they can make a living despite snow leopard incursions. (See snow leopard pictures in National Geographic magazine.)

And that’s exactly what he’s been doing for more than a decade. In 1999 Hussain founded the Snow Leopard Project, an insurance scheme that compensates local people in snow leopard-range countries if their livestock are killed by the predators.

Various branches of the successful project, which is jointly managed by project officials and a committee of villagers, have spread to 400 households covering 3,000 animals across central Asia.

Since 1998, close to U.S. $7,000 has been paid out in compensation for lost animals, and $13,000 invested on improving livestock corrals and other infrastructure. Meanwhile, the snow leopard population seems to have remained stable, if not grown, Hussain said.

Snow Leopard Perspective Controversial

Not everyone agrees. In fact, there is great consternation in the big-cat conservation community about Hussain’s ideas, particularly that conservation groups don’t work with locals. (Learn about National Geographic’s Big Cats Initiative.)

Tom McCarthy, executive director of the Snow Leopard Program for the big-cat conservation group Panthera, said that he doesn’t “know a single conservation [nongovernmental organization] working on snow leopards today that would support setting up reserves for the cats at the expense of local people.”

For example, before Hussain set up the Snow Leopard Project, McCarthy and colleagues founded the award-winning Snow Leopard Enterprises, which helps local people in snow leopard countries generate income.

Conservation biologist and snow leopard expert Jerry Roe also said by email that relabeling the snow leopard as domestic will not resolve the conflict between snow leopards and herders or benefit the species.

For one, “a change of definition will not alter the perspective of snow leopards as a pest species in the eyes of herders,” said Roe, co-founder of California-based Nomad Ecology, an ecological consulting and research company.

Living With Snow Leopards

Hussain thinks the objections are just not valid. Local people—at least in Pakistan—do not have an “atavistic enmity to snow leopards, [nor] this itch to kill it,” he said. “If they get compensated for their losses, they have no interest in eliminating this animal.”

Such is the case with Mohammed Ibrahim, chairman of Skoyo Krabathang Basingo Conservation and Development Organization in Krabathang, Pakistan (map), who also owns 15 goats. In a phone interview with an Urdu interpreter, Ibrahim said that he’s not worried about snow leopards, mostly because of insurance schemes such as Project Snow Leopard that compensate herders for lost animals.

And since snow leopards have never been known to attack people, Hussain is confident that his scheme would work far better than a conservation policy that separates the leopards from the locals: “The idea of co-existing with snow leopards is easy to implement if you satisfy the villagers.”

Ultimately, conservationists share the same goal: Ensuring that the snow leopard—what Hussain calls a “symbol of the high mountains”—can survive. Whether that will continue to be an animal dependent on people for food, though, is still up in the air.

 

Elusive Snow Leopards Collared for Science….

 

 ROARrrrr for Jungle Tiger

http://www.facebook.com/pages/ROARrrrr-for-Jungle-Tiger/166490116742359

 

Scientists have outfitted two snow leopardsin a wild corner of Afghanistan with satellite-tracking collars, a first for the country and a boon for researchers trying to better understand the

habits and favored habitats of the endangered cats.

The snow leopards, both male, were captured in Afghanistan’s northeastern Wakhan Corridor, a narrow strip of desolate, windswept mountains sandwiched between Pakistan and Tajikistan, and a spot where camera traps first snapped the elusive cats in 2011.
The first snow leopard was captured and released on May 27, the second on June 8.
Researchers weighed and measured the animals, took DNA samples and fitted them with satellite collars before sending them on their way.
In the intervening weeks, the first cat has traveled more than 78 miles (125 kilometers) and the second cat has traveled more than 95 miles (153 km), according to a statement from the Wildlife Conservation Society, one of the main participants in the field work.

Snow leopards make their homes in the harsh, rugged mountain regions of 12 Asian nations, yet despite their wide range and impressive survival skills, the spotted cats’ numbers are dwindling. The species has declined by as much as 20 percent in the last 16 years, and only 3,000 to 7,500 individuals remain in the wild, according to population estimates.

Officials with the WCS lauded the recent capture and tracking of the Afghan snow leopards as a milestone in the fight to save the big cats.