Astonishing snow leopard hunt filmed in Pakistan’s remote mountains
Wire desk byline Sourced from Xinhua, Dawn, Arab News, Anadolu and Minute Mirror. Translated and abridged by the GSRRA Desk.
Dramatic footage shows a snow leopard pursuing a markhor through a steep mountain gorge towards a cliff edge.
The snow leopard is well adapted to the high, cold and desolate mountains of Central Asia.
Muscular legs and a tail almost as long as its body allow this elusive cat to negotiate steep, slippery terrain, while its smoky-grey fur offers excellent camouflage against a backdrop of rock and snow.
The snow leopard is crepuscular, meaning it is most active at dawn and dusk, when it hunts a range of large prey, including blue sheep, ibex and markhor – a type of horned goat that can weigh up to 110 kg – as well as small animals, such as marmots, hares and birds.
In this incredible footage, a snow leopard can be seen stalking a markhor in Pakistan’s precipitous mountains. When it makes a final lunge for the animal, something unexpected happens.
According to the Snow Leopard Trust, there are between 3,500 and 7,000 snow leopards left in the wild. An estimated 200 to 420 of these live in the Hindu Kush and Karakoram mountains in Pakistan’s northern provinces of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Gilgit Baltistan and Azad Kashmir.
Reference Link:- https://www.discoverwildlife.com/animal-facts/snow-leopard-hunt-pakistan
Zamir Ahmed Awan is the founder and Chair of the Global Silk Route Research Alliance, a think tank in Islamabad. He studied engineering at Shanghai University in the 1980s, and years later he went back to China as Pakistan's science counsellor in Beijing, from 2010 until 2016, working on science and higher education cooperation between the two countries.…
