Photo credit: Sagar Giri (i click for conservation) @rockerz.charged, with sincere thanks.

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Investigating the Health of Conflict Leopards in Nepal

Nepal is a country which prides itself on its wildlife. But living alongside big cats can be challenging. Every year, lives and livelihoods are threatened as leopards come into conflict with local communities. Typically, this manifests as the loss of a chicken or a goat, which may be devastating enough for a family reliant on their livestock. But, there are also increasing reports of human attacks.

Just last week a 10 year old girl was killed in Tanahun district. This brings the total number of children killed by leopards in the Tanahun to a staggering 16, over the past 7 years. This statistic all the more shocking when you consider Tanahun is roughly the size of Hertfordshire and has a population that is only the size of Bradford.

WVI veterinary partner, Dr Jess Bodgener, is seeking to address this problem through her doctoral research at the University of Kent. She wants to understand more about the health of leopards in Nepal, and whether ill-health could be one of the factors driving these events. She has good reason to think that it might.

In 2022 Jess was part of team investigating canine distemper virus (CDV) in Nepal. While most people think of CDV as a ‘dog disease’, it actually affects a far wider range of species, including big cats. This is a problem, as, not only can CDV be fatal, it can also lead to behavioural changes, including loss of fear.

The results from Nepal, published in the Journal ‘Pathogens’, were alarming. Thirty percent of the leopards tested by the team had antibodies to CDV. This was compared to only eleven percent of tigers.

Jess is quick to stress “This doesn’t mean all leopards involved in conflict are infected with CDV. But it does point to a wider problem. That leopards are living closer to people, and that doing so could be damaging their health”. Sick or injured animals can struggle to catch wild prey and may be forced to attack people or their livestock as a result. To find out more about what is going on, Jess has relocated to Nepal and is working alongside local teams to conduct health assessments and post-mortems.

Conducting post-mortems might not be what every girl dreams of when she says she wants to be a wildlife vet, but Jess has been quick underline their importance to her work. Her commitment to testing all her samples in local labs, also contributes to a wider effort, led by the Cornell K. Lisa Yang Center for Wildlife Health, that aims to increase Nepal’s capacity for wildlife pathology.

Alongside this, Jess has also been working with the National Innovation Centre in Kathmandu. Together they hope to develop low-cost open-source GPS collars, that could be used to monitor translocated leopards after they are released. Translocation is often used as a tool to manage HLC, but the evidence as to whether it is effective is mixed at best. The team are hoping their collars will enable them to find out if it is working in Nepal, or whether it is simply moving the problem and making matters worse.  

Jess has a long history with WVI, and, with your help, we are proud to support this research. Global leopard numbers have declined by more than 30% over the last 22 years, and they are extinct in 26 countries where they once roamed free. Human-wildlife conflict is now one of the biggest threats to their survival. This project will not only inform conservation in Nepal, but could impact the way leopards are managed throughout their range.

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