KATHMANDU: In the afternoon of February 22, 67-year-old Bulal Maharjan, a farmer living on the outskirts of Kathmandu, Nepal, was sitting on his porch chopping cauliflower leaves to feed his chickens. Hearing a loud thud as a parked motorcycle toppled, he turned and watched in horror as a leopard leapt away from the fallen vehicle and lunged at him, piercing its sharp canines into his forehead while its claws lacerated his hands.
Within seconds, neighbours swarmed in, and the leopard ran into a nearby house. They eventually trapped the animal inside. After nearly two hours of panic that saw two more people injured trying to control the distressed big cat, forest division officials managed to sedate it and bring the situation under control.
Maharjan still cannot shake off memories of the attack.
“For three days straight, I couldn’t even sleep. Every time I began to doze, the scene of this attack would jolt me up!” he says. “I think we should just get rid of this animal. Period.”
Sentiments like Maharjan’s are common across Nepal, where leopards have been responsible for significant loss of human life and livestock. Research shows that in the Himalayan nation from 2000 to 2020, conflicts between humans and four large mammals — elephants, rhinos, tigers and common leopards — claimed 887 human lives and led to the killing of 1,139 animals. Of these, common leopards (Panthera pardus) were the leading cause of human deaths, averaging 19 deaths per year, and were also the species most frequently killed.
To try to bring the conflict under control, Nepal and other countries facing human-large predator conflicts are exploring a range of solutions.
Nepal has three ecological zones: lowlands dominated by Bengal tigers, mountainous regions where snow leopards roam, and the vast mid-hills ruled by common leopards as the top predator. While protected areas in the lowlands and mountains receive dedicated conservation funding for their charismatic predators, the mid-hills are largely managed as community forests.
The celebrated community forest programme is a key reason leopards are thriving in the mid-hills. In the early 1990s, amid worsening floods and landslides linked to forest degradation, King Birendra handed over management of large swathes of forest to local communities so they would have a stake in conservation and benefit from timber and fruit harvests. Today, almost 47 per cent of Nepal is covered by forest patches. About one-third of that area belongs to community forests, most of which are managed by people living in the mid-hills.
“But what the communities didn’t realise was they also restored habitats so that the top carnivores could return,” said Kedar Baral, a wildlife biologist for Nepal’s Bagmati Province.
In 2020, Baral’s team conducted an analysis of leopard scat collected in the mid-hills that showed 27 per cent of the animals’ diet consisted of domestic animals, while wild ungulates that big cats typically prefer to hunt, such as barking deer and wild boars, made up only 10 per cent. In search of sprouting leaves, barking deer venture from dense community forests to farmland.
“As the deer enter the farmlands, that’s where the leopard follows,” says Baral, bringing them into contact with domestic livestock.
Nepal’s hydropower and construction projects are also expanding into remote forested areas at higher elevations, disturbing habitats and bringing workers as well as new hunting pressure against top predators, including common leopards. Common leopard pelts from illegal hunting rank among the top confiscated wildlife items in Nepal. That forces leopards and their prey to leave their territory, says Madhu Chetri, a wildlife ecologist at the National Trust for Nature Conservation.
Climate change might also be influencing conflict patterns. While working as a district forest officer in Nepal’s western mid-hills, Baral and his team were repeatedly called to respond to common leopard attacks on local communities. Over time, he noticed a change in the pattern: conflict incidents and human or livestock deaths were increasingly reported from higher-elevation settlements.
Reporting in 2023, Baral and colleagues investigated whether climate change was driving this shift. Using data from 343 sites across Nepal based on leopard scat, animal tracks and kills, the researchers modelled habitat preferences by considering factors such as temperature, rainfall and elevation. The results suggest leopards prefer mid-hill conditions at around 1,000 metres with moderate temperatures and high rainfall. Warming climates are likely expanding suitable habitat uphill, allowing the leopard population to grow and increasing the risk of conflict with humans.
Of course, it is a conservation success worth celebrating when populations of threatened or endangered large carnivores increase — whether lynx, wolves, tigers or leopards — but it also presents new challenges, says Philip Nyhus, a conservation biologist at Colby College in Maine.
Solutions have two parts, he says: first, keeping wildlife separate from people and livestock to prevent conflict, and second, mitigating the impacts when conflict does occur.
“A lot of attention has been given to the second piece,” he says. “What would be better is if we could prevent conflict from happening in the first place.”
There are international examples to draw from. In Argentina’s Dry Chaco forest, for example, small households in wooded areas have faced frequent attacks by pumas on sheep and goats. Sofia Nanni, a conservation biologist at Argentina’s National Scientific and Technical Research Council, worked with local communities to trial spiked leather collars on livestock, an approach that had previously proved successful in reducing leopard attacks on cattle in countries such as Iran.
“We found a local artisan who made collars for dogs and we asked him if he could make collars,” Nanni says.
Tracking collared goats and sheep for two years, her team found puma predation in uncollared groups was 10 times higher than in collared groups. More importantly, they also observed a subtle shift in public attitudes. Since the collars were introduced, locals were less inclined to retaliate against pumas even after attacks.
“I think they started to feel more empowered because they felt that something else could be done to solve the problem,” Nanni says.
Nanni says the studded collar approach could work in countries such as Nepal, which has made significant progress in conserving large carnivores. However, she stresses interventions should be chosen in collaboration with affected communities.
“It’s really them who know what they can do and [who can understand] the cost effectiveness of the interventions. They also feel more attached to the project if they are part of it,” she says.
Although Nepal has not implemented studded collar projects, research suggests predator-proof husbandry with improved fencing and secure corrals produces positive results.
Another important part of the solution is making relief funds widely accessible and simple to obtain. Research has shown that quick and effective compensation systems can often reduce human-wildlife conflict, while slow, underfunded and inefficient programmes can worsen it.
Nepal’s wildlife relief guidelines offer up to one million rupees for the loss of a human life, Rs60,000 for high-value livestock and Rs10,000 for sheep and goats. However, payouts depend on forest officers’ assessments and are often lower.
“Locals won’t pursue a relief payment of 5,000 rupees (about US$33) for a predated goat if the process is cumbersome, takes months to prepare documents, and costs 3,000 rupees in the process. What’s the point of it?” says Shashank Poudel, a human-wildlife conflict specialist working with WWF Nepal.
Several other strategies are successfully reducing conflicts involving leopards and other top predators around the world. In Kenya, researchers have used low-cost, solar-powered, multicoloured LED arrays that flash to mimic human presence and keep leopards away from farms. In India, where leopards frequently raise cubs in sugarcane fields, conservationists work with farmers to adjust harvest schedules and monitor the animals, reducing the risk of encounters between people and protective leopard mothers. Elsewhere, AI-backed camera traps help hundreds of villages anticipate tiger movements and prevent human-wildlife conflict. Research from South Africa also suggests that playing recordings of human voices may help deter predators.
Still, changing attitudes, implementing effective interventions and improving compensation systems can take years, while frustration among affected communities continues to grow. Maharjan, who survived a leopard attack, is still waiting to receive relief for his medical bills.- Kathmandu Post/ANN
