Owner Comments:
Country: Krygyzstan
Year of Issue: 2012
Value: 10 Som KGS
Metal: Silver W/Svarovski crystal inlays
Weight: 28.28g
Diameter: 38.6mm
Mintage: 3,000
Population: 1 Top Pop
Grading Service: NGC
Grade: PF69 Ultra Cameo
References: KM# 53
Numista Rarity Index: 93
For the elusive snow leopard in Kyrgyzstan, a satisfying meal consists of an ibex or an argali. As it happens, these wild relatives of goat and sheep—bearers of spectacular, curved horns—are also the quarry of trophy hunters.
Although a quota system has been in place to regulate the number of animals taken for trophies, until recently intense illegal hunting in Kyrgyzstan has severely depleted these ungulates, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which sets the conservation status of species. And as their main prey animals have grown scarcer, the numbers of snow leopards, which are endangered globally, have fallen too.
But after President Almazbek Atambayev took office in December 2011, the picture has brightened for Kyrgyzstan’s snow leopards. This March he ordered a hundred-square-mile (260-square-kilometer) former trophy hunting concession called Shamshy, in the northern Tian Shan Mountains, to be set aside as a fully protected natural habitat for the cats.
According to the Snow Leopard Trust, a United States-based nonprofit that works through local communities to protect the animals, mountainous Kyrgyzstan—which offers ideal habitat for the leopards—now holds no more than 500 of them. That’s about 10 percent of the worldwide total, estimated at between 4,000 and 6,500 in Russia and 11 Central Asian countries—a range encompassing more than 800,000 square miles (two million square kilometers).
Saving Kyrgyzstan’s snow leopards is a high priority for the survival of the species. That’s because the country lies between northern snow leopard populations in Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan and the more southerly ones in the Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges. Snow leopards are migratory—known to make long treks out of their home ranges—and Kyrgyzstan serves as a corridor between the two populations. Their intermixing strengthens the overall gene pool.
During the two and a half decades since gaining independence in 1991, Kyrgyzstan, like all the former Soviet-controlled nations, has struggled to make the transition from communism. Many state agencies have suffered from a lack of funds, and according to Eric W. Sievers, a political analyst associated with Harvard University's Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies who directed various development projects in Central Asia throughout the 1990s, hunting licenses don’t always go toward conservation. Instead, “local-level observers claim that the funds go no further than the pockets of corrupt officials.”
In these circumstances national parks and reserves have gotten short shrift. Rangers have been underpaid, undertrained, and underequipped, and wildlife laws have been enforced weakly or not at all.
Snow leopards have suffered accordingly. The Kyrgyz government estimates that the snow leopard population has been halved during the past 20 years. And during the three-year period from 2003 to 2006 alone, the argali population fell from an estimated 26,000 to fewer than 16,000.
The main reason for the argali decline, Sievers says, is that “more argali permits were issued to American hunters than national law allowed.” Sievers cites one year, 1996, when 27 argali trophies were imported into the U.S. from Kyrgyzstan. But only 18 permits were issued “in accordance to Kyrgystan law,” according to government archives, meaning that at least nine additional permits were issued off the books.
Thanks to National Geographic for this article.