Though most Mongolians are Buddhist and revere all life forms, they sometimes retaliate if a snow leopard kills a yak or horse. Across central Asia, people with different religions, languages, customs, historical enmities and sometimes-hostile governments, compete with the snow leopard for its prey throughout the cat's range. Even marmots, a staple summer food for snow leopards, are shot for their meat and skins. In places where wild prey has been depleted by hunting and overgrazing, the cats subsist partially on domestic livestock. Villagers retaliate by snaring and trapping the leopards.
Poachers also search out the cats for their pelts and bones.
In the republics of central Asia, everything is for sale, says Eugene Koshkarev, a former researcher at the Tien Shan Physical Geography Station in Krygyzstan. In addition to the pelts, the bones are now sold as a substitute for tiger bones in the trade for traditional Chinese medicine. The result is that this regal mountain cat is under siege. No one knows how many snow leopards survive, but the animals have probably always been rare, their numbers constrained by limited prey. Experts estimate as few as 4,500 may remain, or as many as 7,500.