OVER THE past couple of years, village communities in Ladakh have been building Stupas next to traditional wolf traps, committing to stop killing wolves. They have also begun creating their own local insurance schemes to compensate for livestock that are preyed on by wolves. 🗞️ Subscribe Now: Get Express Premium to access the best Election reporting and analysis 🗞️ Now, a paper, “A community based conservation initiative for wolves in the Ladakh Trans-Himalaya’’, has been published in Frontiers, an international ecology journal, describing the success of the initiative. The Tibetan wolf is one of the world’s most ancient species and is critically endangered in the country, protected as a Schedule I animal under the Wildlife Protection Act. “We built long-term relationships with multiple visits before the conservation interventions were initiated. This helped us understand that the intention behind killing wolves was purely to protect livestock. We did not pursue any wish to penalise community members involved in hunting wolves, nor did we seek to destroy the Shandong (wolf traps), which represent an important part of the cultural heritage,” said Karma Sonam, lead author of the paper and field manager with Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF), an advocacy group that is steering the initiative. Shangdong are traditional trapping pits with inverted funnel-shaped stone walls, usually built near villages or herder camps. Typically, a live domestic animal is placed in the pit to attract the wolves. Once the wolves jump into the pit, the walls prevent them from escaping. The trapped wolves are usually stoned to death. In a survey covering over 25,000 sq km, the NCF enumerated 94 Shandong in 58 of the 64 surveyed villages in Leh district between June 2019 and March 2020. Thirty of these had been used to kill wolves in the past 10 years. The village councils have now begun creating insurance schemes, as part of a pilot project launched by NCF, to compensate for livestock lost to wolves. “Wolves hunt in packs and target even bigger animals like Yak, cattle or horses, thus causing higher financial losses. Killing one horse would cost a villager between Rs 60,000-80,000,’’ said NCF’s Dorjay Rigzin, who is a part of the project. The Wildlife department provides compensation for loss of livestock due to wolves, but not more than Rs 7,000-8,000. “Besides the process is complicated. For instance, one has to provide proof that a wolf has killed livestock. Then, to apply for compensation, villagers need to travel to Leh town, which is hundreds of kilometres away - they would often have to trek for two-three days even before reaching a road to Leh. It is far more economical to simply kill the wolf,’’ said Rigzin. Under the insurance programme, the amount contributed by each villager can range from Rs 1,200-2,400 annually for each animal, which can take the village corpus to Rs 30,000-1 lakh collectively in a year - this amount is matched by the NCF, according to Bijoor. The insurance amount is collected annually and the payout is also annual, based on an assessment of how many animals are killed during the year. “The village committee decides if the case is authentic. One of the biggest problems in government-run schemes is that of false claims,” said Bijoor. Out of 32 sub-species of wolves that are recognised, two are believed to inhabit the Indian subcontinent: the Tibetan Wolf, whose range extends from trans-Himalaya into Tibet and China, and the Indian wolf that ranges over peninsular India. Dean of Wildlife Institute of India (WII) and wolf expert, Dr Y V Jhala, says lineages of wolves in India are some of the most ancient in the world. “Unlike the Indian wolf, which we know numbers around 3,000, there is not enough data on the Tibetan wolf. Although one scientific paper has estimated that there are 500 of them. This is because the nature of the topography in Ladakh, which is remote and formidable, makes a survey difficult to conduct. Both sub-species are critically endangered and yet, there are no conservation projects launched by the Government for wolves,’’ he said. It was in 2017 that the NCF started working with communities and religious leaders to support the neutralisation of the Shandong while preserving their structure, and assisted the communities to build Stupas. In June 2018, the Chushul community neutralised all the four Shandong in their area and built a Stupa next to one. The next year, the Rumptse community in the Gya-Miru region of Changthang followed suit - as did the Himya community in 2021. “Our initial intention was to carry out the project across 60,000 sq km covering both districts within Ladakh, namely Leh and Kargil. But due to the pandemic, this was not possible. The blocks of Changthang, Rong, and Sham were selected based on evidence from literature, local knowledge and Wildlife officials who confirmed that wolf-human conflict here was high,’’ said NCF's Bijoor. “Some villages had more than one Shangdong. They would be built near winter grazing grounds, or near corrals where sheep or goats were kept. Apart from keeping a goat or sheep in the Shangdong as bait, sometimes villagers would capture wolf cubs and keep them in the Shangdong to kill the mother wolf that would come to the cubs' aid,” said Rigzin.
