Ten leopard skins seized another indication of the scale of the trade

Without going into too much detail, for obvious reasons, when the news came through just on a week ago that this operation had been successful — that’s not what I thought. Ten more leopards are dead, brutal deaths no doubt, most likely vast areas ecologically further messed up.

The seizure took place in Uttar Pradesh and I’ve been getting as much information as possible. The northern Indian state, bordering Nepal, is a trafficking hotspot. Not just illegal wildlife trade either, last night I sent a friend who is involved in combatting human trafficking, a recently made video telling of the thousands of young women trafficked annually across the porous India and Nepal border. In Blood of the Leopard there’s a section on crime convergence, traffickers aren’t fussy — drugs, weapons, people and wildlife — money and crime are bedfellows.

I’ve mentioned several times before the rule of thumb that for every leopard body parts seizure there’s at least four more that slipped through the net. Some think, including an oft-quoted reasoning by India customs authorities, that it’s much more than four, it’s probably closer to ten. The bottom line is no one knows. This seizure just a week ago is really an indicator that the trade is still booming, that the Blood of the Leopard is spilling, overflowing. It’s an indicator our net is nowhere near big enough.

I didn’t want to be writing this today. I was planning on something more about leopard subspecies, but even that, with critically endangered status plaguing different leopards in different regions, is sobering. That writing may be about a week away now, there’s work to be done on the living assessment side of Blood of the Leopard and further development with LeopardEye as tech lands in different countries, all part of the effort at ground level which at the end of the day, is the only protection strategy which will ensure the leopard remains with us. A seizure is proof of death.

That being said, there are high-level traffickers who must be targeted, these are the people who frustratingly are getting away with so much murder. This recent seizure has raised a flag on the possibility of a certain trafficker being involved, watch this space.

It’s frightening to think how many leopards are being killed. It is to me anyway. The profits, the networks, the callousness of buyers, there’s a huge blight on humanity when it comes to wildlife crime. The Uttar Pradesh seizure, which resulted in four arrests, is the tip of the iceberg. While it doesn’t shake my determination, it does put a dent in my thinking around that we humans really care about wildlife. As always, it is a case we can only protect what we can.

As Blood of the Leopard gets expanded, my sincere hope is that those going through it see way beyond the clinical statistical side and actually think about what a leopard goes through because of us, before that big cat becomes a commodity in illegal wildlife trade. This is what is lacking and it’s something I’m grappling with personally, the fact that we are not united to really get on top of this scourge that is wildlife trafficking. The barriers put up to do better are inflicted by apathy which is a great paradox when one observes the hype around safaris, wildlife documentaries and getting the big shot for Instagram etc. Something has gone very wrong in our psyche around this — maybe it really is all about human ego. Regardless, that apathy is killing the cat.

On that, to finish, just some housekeeping. I wrote previously that there was unwanted attention at our online platforms, hackers are a type of poacher. You’ll see now that changes have happened so as to up security. One upshot is that I now use a new secure email address jack@wildleopard.net, another change but the other addresses will end up there anyway, no problem now except that the time and money spent making that happen meant frustrations. You’ll see that WildTiger (WT) is now parked at Mission Leopard but again, it’s just a sorting out process as WT returns to its roots in work combatting trafficking. Sometimes forced change can end up positive.

As always, I thank those on the journey, we can win, part of that is to reduce the apathy, I’m sticking to my promise to keep trying, a promise made while looking into the eyes of a leopard.