Happy International Snow Leopard Day!
Oddly enough, although appropriately give the date, it’s felt like ‘All Snow Leopards All the Time’ lately in my world. Zoo New England has become more and more deeply involved in snow leopard conservation in the last few years. A few of the highlights:
We have been supporting the Snow Leopard Trust for many years now in their conservation work in the Gobi-Altai mountains of western Mongolia. Their amazing work with their ground breaking research on snow leopards and prey species (argali sheep and ibex) is matched by their excellent work with local communities, supporting them in alternative livelihood efforts, helping to protect their livestock from predation by snow leopards, and helping to get them to protect these top carnivores rather than kill them to protect their herds. A recent update on their work can be found here if you want to learn more.
Zoo New England also now runs the Sabin Snow Leopard Grants program. Early this year we awarded six grants to snow leopard conservationists, ranging up to $15,000 each, to support their efforts to study and protect snow leopards in Mongolia, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Bhutan. The current round of pre-proposals has recently closed with 22 new applications; our review committee will be meeting to make decisions for final submissions at the end of October.
I am also involved in a few other snow leopard-related projects. One is the IUCN Red List (and Green List) assessment for snow leopards. Every 10 years IUCN (the leading international conservation organization in the world, with over 14,000 member organizations) tries to assess wildlife species to provide status ranks – Endangered, Vulnerable, Near Threatened, Least Concern, and so on. The last assessment, in 2016, moved the snow leopard from Endangered to Vulnerable, and the current assessment is looking over all of the information that has been collected since then to see if that status still holds. We hope to have the final assessment report completed by early 2026, so stay tuned!
The Green List is another effort, more recently developed, to provide better overall information on each species. While the Red List basically determines a species’ risk of extinction, the Green List assesses its recovery status – how much hope there is for that species, in short.
I am also serving on the Steering Committee for the AZA (Association of Zoos and Aquarium) SAFE (Saving Animals from Extinction) Snow Leopard Program. The SAFE Programs are efforts to bring many of the 250+ AZA institutions together to help conserve specific species in the wild. The SAFE Snow Leopard Program is relatively new, and we are finalizing our first three-year Action Plan. So stay tuned on that one, too!
Finally, Zoo New England is a recent recipient of a large grant to initiate a conservation program in the mountains of northern Pakistan. This program will begin in April of 2026, and one of the key species it is expecting to protect in that landscape is the snow leopard. I will certainly write more on that in the near future, so once again, stay tuned!
Leave a Reply