How the Changpas of Leh, who rear pashmina goats, chose to save the animal that hunts their livestock

The Changpa people of Leh have a simple way of dealing with wolves that lift their prized pashmina goats: a contraption called shang-dong. This traditional wolf trap looks like an upturned ice-cream cone. Only, it is made of stones and buried in the ground. The trap’s sloping roof is open at the top; inside a three-metre-deep pit there is usually meat bait. Once the wolves leap in, the conical walls ensure they can’t clamber out. Generally, the canines, when caught, are stoned to death, and villagers pay the wolf-catchers for their service.

But in June this year, something rather different unfolded at a shang dong in Leh’s Chushul village. Buddhist monks in maroon robes gathered around a trap whose walls had been torn down, and Bakula Rangdol Nyima Rinpoche, a revered monk, consecrated a stupa right next to the shang-dong. This was a symbolic gesture to mark peace between man and wolf.

How did this remarkable transformation come about?

Shang-dong are common in the high-altitude cold deserts of Ladakh, also called the Indian Changthang. Researchers of the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), who arrived here more than a decade ago to study large carnivores including snow leopards, have for long been concerned by the threats these traps posed.

“Wolves are persecuted almost everywhere around the world and the Tibetan plateau and its mountains are no different,” says Charudutt Mishra, Science and Conservation Director of the Snow Leopard Trust and founder trustee of NCF. There are no estimates of how many wolves are trapped in shang-dongs every year, or how many now remain in this area, but a basic survey more than 20 years ago put their numbers in Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh at just 350.

The wolf is given the highest protection in India, and is listed under Schedule I of the Wildlife Protection Act. The Himalayan subspecies, found across Jammu and Kashmir, Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, distinguished by a predominantly white coat, faces several threats, including retaliatory killing, and recently, they were observed hybridising with feral dogs.

The stakes have never been higher: in the Indian Changthang alone, 55% of households depend entirely on ‘soft gold’, as pashmina or cashmere wool is called in Kashmiri. Every year, these households, spread across 22,000 sq. km., produce approximately 37,000 kg of the wool annually.

Trouble makers

As the global demand for pashmina grows, more of Central Asia’s open wild lands have transformed into grazing pastures. This has not only impacted the populations of wild herbivores, but also intensified the human-carnivore conflict, especially with the wolves and snow leopards that prey on the goats. In the Indian Changthang alone, wolves — one of 13 species of wild carnivores found here — are responsible for up to 60% of the total livestock predation. Shang-dongs, then, were seen as the best way to catch these trouble-makers.

The wolf | Photo Credit: Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi

“How do you convince people to conserve a species that poses a threat to their livelihoods?” asks Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi, who heads the India programme of the Snow Leopard Trust. In 2016, Suryawanshi and NCF researchers studied attitudes towards snow leopards and wolves among Buddhist and Muslim communities in Ladakh. They found that even though religion by itself was not an indication of a person’s attitude towards these animals, the extent to which people practised religion produced a more positive attitude towards carnivores in Buddhist communities. This indicated that it could be useful to integrate “locally relevant religious philosophies” into conservation.

Simultaneously, researchers also began engaging actively with the Changpa. After two years and seven rounds of discussions initiated by Karma Sonam, NCF’s Ladakh Programme Coordinator, the decision to dismantle four traps and build a stupa near one of them materialised. Several people and organisations played crucial roles: from an enthusiastic youth association that reached out to villagers, to lamas and monks from local gompas, to the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council that helped implement the idea.

Encouraging change

It was important to tighten the traditional link between culture, livelihood and conservation, says Suryawanshi. “So it was crucial that the traps were not destroyed but merely dismantled. The shang-dongs are a part of Changpa culture and they should not lose that.” The villagers also contributed to the construction of the stupa and arranged the inauguration ceremony.

This is definitely a very encouraging change, says Mishra. “We believe the initiative is replicable; it is part of our larger effort to assist communities and farmers with sustainable ways of livestock production, particularly sustainable pashmina. We call this initiative Snow Leopard Friendly Pashmina, and we hope to replicate it across pashmina-producing communities.”

In a system, implemented by NCF, Snow Leopard Trust, and the All Changthang Pashmina Growers Marketing Cooperative Society, pashmina will be certified as ‘Snow Leopard Friendly’ if it meets 15 conditions. Neutralising shang-dongs is just one of them. Others include rotational grazing, maintaining a village wildlife reserve where grazing and hunting are prohibited, predator-proofing livestock corrals and stopping all retaliatory killing of carnivores including wolves and snow leopards.

Pashmina that meets these conditions will be sold at a premium once the initiative takes off in the coming year. But the wolf traps go beyond the land of pashmina, says Suryawanshi. “So we hope the idea and symbol of the stupa will spread to the realms of the snow leopards in Jammu and Kashmir and Tibet too.”

“I think more such stupas should be built and shang-dongs neutralised,” says Pankaj Raina, the Wildlife Warden of Leh who works with the Jammu and Kashmir Department of Wildlife Protection, which has supported the project enthusiastically. “This kind of a large-scale movement will yield great conservation results.”