This beautiful big cat, with smoky grey fur dotted with black spots and rosettes, has an uncanny ability to disappear among the rocks and rugged slopes it inhabits. Living in patches of suitable habitat among the Earth’s most remote and challenging regions, snow leopards have likely always been rare, and rarely seen as well. Nonetheless, this cat’s charisma is so great that it figures largely in the cultures of predominantly pastoral people in its range, and is a symbol of high-mountain ecosystems.

The snow leopard is listed as globally endangered on the IUCN Red List, the Red Book of Kyrgyzstan, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Flora and Fauna (which prohibits international trade of the animal and its parts/products).

The estimated size of its distributional range is about 1.8 million km2, with the largest share in the Tibetan plateau of China, followed by Mongolia and India.

Saving Kyrgyzstan’s snow leopards is of high priority for the survival of the species. This is because the country lies between northern snow leopard populations, in Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan, and the more southerly ones in the Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges. Snow leopards are migratory, and Kyrgyzstan serves as a corridor between these two populations. Their intermixing strengthens the overall gene pool.