When the World Comes for the Snow Leopard

Tanzin has watched this mountain long enough to know which slopes the cats prefer, which corridors they use to move between valleys, and where they are likely to be when the light comes up. By the time the tourists reach the ridge, cameras raised, breath visible in the cold, the cat is still there.

Most tourists come from France, Singapore, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. Roughly 350 to 550 visitors arrive in Kibber each winter specifically to see snow leopards, most of them between December and February when sightings are most reliable. About 40% carry serious photography equipment. They stay in community homestays, hire local scanners and guides, buy gloves and socks and carpets made by women in the village. Kibber has 13 active homestays, 25 local wildlife spotters, and around 30 women selling handicrafts through the winter season.

In recent years, two snow leopard siblings, known in the community as Chunnu and Munnu, became the absolute draw of the winter season. Visitors from across the world were coming specifically to find these cats. They are the cubs of Dolma, a snow leopard that Snow Leopard Trust and Nature Conservation Foundation’s field team and community partners have been closely following since 2022. A year after a Valentine’s Day date with a male, she was seen with two cubs about nine months old.

The community watched them grow, the cubs diligently following their mother, learning to hunt and navigate the cliffs. By late 2023, the siblings had gone out on their own. Unlike most snow leopard siblings, which separate and go their own ways after dispersing, Chunnu and Munnu stayed together through the spring of 2024, the first time such a sibling association has been observed in the species.

Tourism changed how Kibber sees the snow leopard. A 2026 study on snow leopard tourism in Kibber by researchers from the NCF and SLT found that where there was once hostility, there is now respect and, in many cases, something closer to love. The study found that the winter tourism season has become the busiest and most lucrative time of year for homestay owners, spotters, handicraft sellers, and drivers, providing income during months when agricultural earnings drop to almost nothing. Winter, once the quietest season in Kibber, is now its busiest.

Not all the findings in the report were positive. The tourists who stay in the village, the ones who book a week with a scanner and wake before dawn to climb ridges, are by most accounts respectful and engaged. The ones who come for the day are a different story. Day visitors often litter. Some drive off-road, cutting across pasture and crops. Homestay waste increases sharply in winter. Key informants in the study on snow leopard tourism in Kibber estimated that about one in ten tourists is disrespectful to local people. At the same time, interviewed residents put it closer to one in fifty. Many arrive expecting a guaranteed sighting, and when the cat does not appear on schedule, some become visibly disappointed, putting pressure on scanners and guides.

Strict fines for littering are already in place in the village. The study also recommends structured visitor briefings, delivered in person or in writing before tourists set out, so expectations are clear and practices like baiting that go against conservation guidelines are less likely.

In 2025, Kibber’s conservation efforts were recognized with a Wildlife and Tourism Initiative Award from TOFT (Tour Operators for Tigers). Behind the scenes, considerable work was needed to ensure the award went to the local community rather than a more distant government agency.

Thirty years ago, snow leopards were not considered an asset in Kibber. A snow leopard that entered a corral could kill dozens of livestock in a single night, and the community had no way to absorb that loss. After one such attack, the villagers beat the cat to death. In the 1990s, community members suffering losses would say: “This is your snow leopard, you want to save it, take it away with you.” By 2023, the same community was arguing with a neighboring village: “This is our snow leopard, you cannot claim it alone.”

Our team at the Nature Conservation Foundation and Snow Leopard Trust spent decades building the conditions that made a different relationship possible. Livestock insurance helped offset the losses that make predation intolerable. Predator-resistant corrals reduced the frequency of attacks. Grazing-free reserves set aside to allow prey populations to recover meant snow leopards had more to eat beyond the village herds. Blue sheep in the region are now five times more abundant than before those reserves were established. The last known retaliatory killing of a snow leopard in Kibber was in the mid-1990s. A few years ago, when a sick snow leopard strayed near the village, the community helped care for it, and when it eventually died, they gave it a respectful funeral.

Tourism didn’t cause this shift on its own, but it gave the change in attitudes an economic reason to last.

Ask anyone in Kibber today whether they want snow leopards here. In a 2026 study of the village, not one person said no. The tourism economy, the camera traps, the women who identify individual cats by coat pattern and feed that data into global monitoring programs, the scanners who know which slope to watch at which hour: none of this existed thirty years ago. The cat on the ridge this morning does not know any of this. It is moving through the same landscape its kind always has, following the same corridors, hunting the same prey, living a life that is all its own.

View the full paper and acknowledgments.

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Photo credits: Noam Keydar, Prasen Yadav, Himachal Pradesh Forest Department (HPFD) – Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF)

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