Re Snow Leopards

Owned and disappeared. Not just dolphins. M. R. O’Connor writes that “since 2008, researchers in the southern Gobi region of Mongolia... have outfitted more than twenty snow leopards with GPS.” The snow leopards’ locations are then transmitted to a satellite so researchers can track numbers, terrain, migrations, and predation patterns.

Outfitted.

Which entails who doing what to what?

Or collared.

To put a collar on a snow leopard means trap with baited leg snare; “immobilize” with sedative-tipped jab stick; release with radio-tracking collar around neck. In Darla Hillard’s Vanishing Tracks, there’s a photo of a sedated snow leopard remaining “calm” while the collar is being attached.

Researchers know that capturing wild animals can stress or kill them. They believe, however, that data gathered will help conserve the species. Conservation: a desideratum. But humans are the problem for snow leopards, radio tracking with collars a human solution. No consent from the ensnared / immobilized snow leopard sought or given.

Might there be other strategies? More “camera trapping”—i.e., taking pictures? Drones? Or, how many snow leopards do conservationists need to collar until they have enough data? Perhaps researchers should also / instead capture / sedate / collar / track Homo sapiens. As Chris Wilmers put it, “We already know that humans are incredibly lethal predators. We kill other predators at a much higher rate than any other predator kills predators.”

Elizabeth Kolbert notes that our eight billion humans “outweigh wild mammals by a ratio of more than eight to one,” that if you add in domesticated animals the “ratio climbs to twenty-three to one.”

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Toward the other end of the scale, it’s estimated there are four to ten thousand snow leopards in the Himalayas, six hundred snow leopards in zoos. Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard (1978), tried but failed to see one in the Himalayas. O’Connor writes that Matthiessen would have known that “visiting one in a zoo [is] not the same thing.”

True, no doubt, but impossible that Matthiessen, gifted writer and environ-mentalist, would have used the word visiting. That is, how can you “visit” a captive?

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As for elephants “saved” in zoos, Charles Siebert writes, “It might still be characterized as a Noah’s Ark story, except that we ourselves have become the all-consuming flood that floats and justifies the vessel in which animals are confined.”