E nvIROnMEnT
revival of leopard numbers.
Native Species
The North China leopard, confusingly categorised as Panthera par-
dus japonensis, is a subspecies of the Panthera family. The name comes
from zoologist John Edward Gray who was working at the British
Museum and based it on a leopard skin obtained from Japan in 1862.
However, the skin originally came from Beijing and subsequent stud-
ies proved it was from a leopard that lived in a northwestern moun-
tain area outside the city.
Historically, the mountain ranges surrounding Beijing, accounting
for over 60 percent of the city’s current territory, were major habitats
of the North China leopard. Rapid urbanisation and increasing hu-
man interventions during the process saw the species disappear from
the region in the 1990s.
Leopards are widely distributed across Africa and Asia, but popula-
tions have become reduced and isolated, and they have been driven
from large portions of their historic range. According to the most
recent assessment of the species by the International Union for Con-
servation of Nature (IUCN), evidence suggests that leopard popula-
tions have been “dramatically reduced due to continued persecution
with increased human populations, increased illegal wildlife trade,
excessive harvesting for ceremonial use of skins, prey base declines
and poorly managed trophy hunting” and “suitable leopard range has
been reduced by over 30 percent worldwide in the last three genera-
tions (22.3 years).” The leopard in general is listed as “vulnerable” on
the IUCN Redlist.
The Taihang Mountain range expands in a north-south direction
from Beijing to Hebei and Shanxi Provinces, then further south
to Henan Province and touches on the Qinling Mountain range
in Shaanxi Province. In recent decades as the natural corridors of
mountain forest areas have been blocked due to newly-built roads
and villages, or given over to agriculture, the habitat of the leopard in
northern China has shrunk dramatically. Prey species of the leopard,
including wild boar (Sus scrofa) and the Siberian roe (Capreolus pyg-
argus), once populous inside these mountain ranges are increasingly
under threat from illegal hunters’ wire loop traps, iron hunter traps
and electrified wire netting, leading to collapses in prey populations
across the whole region. Since 2000, according to the CFCA, there
has been no recorded sighting of a leopard in the Beijing region.
In the winter of 2012, a camera trap installed in Xiao Wutai Na-
tional Reserve in Hebei Province captured a glimpse of a leopard.
This was the closest position to Beijing for a decade. According to
Song Dazhao, the CFCA has attempted investigations and research
in Beijing’s mountain ranges for years but so far no leopard has been
spotted. “The biggest problem is the lack of prey to support a healthy
breeding population of leopards,” Song told ChinaReport.
Conflicts Resolution
Based on images collected through some 100 camera traps across
an overall area of nearly 300 square kilometres in Shanxi since 2013,
Song Dazhao told ChinaReport, so far a total of around 15 to 18 adult
leopards have been recorded. This population is proving fairly stable
and is breeding in the area. Song also acknowledged that no study
has been conducted so far on how young leopards migrate to other
places after they mature, and that they are considering using radio
tracking for further study. “What we can assure for now is the safety
of the leopard population within the area under our monitoring, but
we cannot assure their safety when they move out of the area,” added
Song.
In 2016, a 100MW wind power project was planned by the lo-
cal authority of Heshun county in the Taihang Mountain range. If it
gets the go ahead, the project will destroy the natural habitat of the
leopard as a proposed road of 100 kilometres would be constructed
along the mountain slope. The CFCA and a couple of other environ-
mental NGOs have issued a joint petition to the local government to
change the project location to avoid the potentially lethal impact on
the leopards. So far negotiations have gone smoothly and this May,
Sun Yongsheng, the party secretary of Heshun County, announced
on a local television channel that construction plans for the project
had been adjusted to make way for the movement of the leopards.
The raising of beef cattle has historically been a pillar industry in
Heshun and almost all households in Mafang town – the focus of
the CFCA’s conservation project – have raised cattle on the nearby
mountain as major source of income. Normally, villagers would let
their cattle freely roam the mountain and check on their livestock
once every week or two.
With the recovery of leopard numbers, there have been frequent
attacks by leopards on calves or adult cattle, causing significant finan-
cial impact on local villagers. The market price for a calf is around
5,000 to 6,000 yuan (US$725 to $870) and for adult cattle, over
10,000 yuan (US$1,449) a head – a significant amount in a poor
rural area where villager’s annual average income is just 10,000 yuan
(US$1,449)
This directly results in retaliation by local villagers towards the leop-
ard that killed their cattle. Despite the leopard’s listing as a first class
national level protected animal, whose killing is punishable with a
prison term, villagers secretly conduct the killing through poisoning.
Leopards have the habit of coming back a few times to eat their un-
finished prey, which allows villagers to inject poison into the cattle’s
corpse. “Cases of leopards attacking cattle often take place in spring
when calves are newly born. It used to be very common for locals to
carry out retaliatory poisoning when their calves were killed by leop-
ards within the region,” recounted Song to ChinaReport.
Since 2015, to alleviate the human-carnivore conflict in the region,
the CFCA started to try compensation for local villagers who lost
cattle to leopard attacks. The compensation was set at 2,000 yuan
(US$290) per head of adult cattle and 1,000 yuan (US$145) for a
calf. According to Song, in that year alone, a total of 70,000 yuan
(US$ 10,149) was spent on compensation for the deaths of 48 cattle