News from the Islamic world war zones
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, September 2005:
The World Wildlife Fund, which usually supports trophy
hunting as a conservation strategy, is opposing a scheme advanced by
Mumtaz Malik, chief conservator of Northwestern Frontier Province,
Pakistan, to introduce trophy hunting for leopards. Officially,
about 40 snow leopards survive in Pakistan, but hunters and herders
claim there are 150-250. Two were shot in June after one snow
leopard allegedly killed six women in two weeks by pouncing down on
them from trees as they gathered firewood near Abbottabad. Malik
claims to have saved markhor mountain goats, a prey species for snow
leopards, by introducing markhor trophy hunting.
Thirty-five small herds totaling 155 markor, a mountain goat
standing six feet tall at the shoulder, have recently been
rediscovered near the Line of Control dividing Kashmir, India, from
Pakistan. “As recently as 1970 there were 25,000 on the Indian
side,” reported Justin Huggler, Delhi correspondent for The
Independent, “but by 1997 they had been poached to near extinction,”
as troops and guerillas often turned their guns from fighting over
the boundary to profiteering on the sale of the markors’ spectacular
spiral horns.