IWN Report — Friday, 18 September 2026

Seven predator-proof livestock corrals built from local stone, mud and chain-link fencing by herders in Ladakh‘s Sumdo have kept snow leopards and wolves out for two straight years, a turnaround from a six-month spell in 2020 that cost the settlement more than 100 sheep and goats across a dozen separate attacks.

The Snow Leopard Trust first offered Sumdo’s herding families — some 70 refugee herders in all — a corral design borrowed from Tost, in Mongolia’s South Gobi, but the design assumed open steppe, not Sumdo’s rocky, high-altitude terrain and harsher climate. The herders built their own version instead, walling their pens in local stone and mud and roofing them in chain-link.

“The herders don’t want a predator-proof corral; they want agency,” said Ajay Bijoor, a colleague on the project at the Trust, describing the shift from handing over a fix to letting the community adapt one. Seven of the redesigned corrals have gone up in Sumdo, and none has lost an animal to a snow leopard or wolf in the two years since.

Two Decades

The corral redesign grew out of work led by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi, known within the Trust as Kullu, who has studied snow leopards in the Indian Himalaya since 2008. He first encountered the animal that January in Spiti, spotting an adult female with a cub and a young male he later named Shadow — only the second confirmed sighting in the valley in a decade. By February 2023, two snow leopard sightings in the same week near Kibber had become unremarkable, part of a population that years of camera-trap data show has stayed stable.

Suryawanshi’s doctoral research surveyed attitudes toward the cats across Spiti’s villages. Tolerance, he found, tracked not a herder’s own losses but how much the wider community had lost, and whether any institutional support existed at all. When he asked villagers directly about their losses, many told him plainly that the cat has to eat too. That response held even though the economic loss from a single incident, as Suryawanshi has put it, can be similar to losing one’s home in an earthquake.

Beyond Ladakh

Sumdo’s corrals sit alongside a wider set of community programmes run by the Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF-India), which co-funds corral reinforcement work and has run a livestock insurance scheme in Spiti and Ladakh’s Changthang region for more than 20 years. Herding families pay an annual premium and are compensated for animals lost to predators. NCF-India says the approach has coincided, across two decades, with no recorded instance of a community retaliating by killing a large carnivore in either region.

Snow leopards carry the highest protection available under India’s Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. India’s first nationwide assessment of the species, carried out between 2019 and 2023 across some 1.2 lakh square kilometres of high-altitude habitat, put the national population at approximately 718, according to a Lok Sabha reply from the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change. Ladakh accounted for 477 of that figure, the highest of any region, with Himachal Pradesh — home to Spiti — at 51.

Suryawanshi recounts nearly two decades of the fieldwork behind those numbers in a new book, The Ghost of the Mountains: Unraveling the Secrets of the Snow Leopard, published this month.

Sources: Snow Leopard Trust · Nature Conservation Foundation (NCF-India) · Press Information Bureau