An update to the WildTiger Snapshot series — combining the original findings with new data, field experience, and the current state of leopard trafficking and conflict.
April 2026 update: This page updates the Snapshot 2023 report published on 1 February 2023, bringing it forward as a preview of a major new body of work — Blood of the Leopard (BoL) — The Report — currently in final preparation and due for publication in mid 2026. BoL incorporates data from the CITES Conference of the Parties (November 2025), updated seizure records through Q1 2026, field intelligence, and analysis from partner organisations including The Jane Goodall Institute (JGI) Nepal . The original Snapshot findings remain entirely valid. What has changed is the scale of the documented crisis — and our understanding of its drivers. PLEASE NOTE: While BoL has emphasis on South Asia, particularly the India/Nepal region, the full report will reflect the challenges facing the leopard globally.
The Numbers: Where We Stand in 2026
When the first WildTiger Snapshot was published in 2022, we reported a cumulative India/Nepal total of 5,000 leopards killed based on seizure and poaching incident data since the year 2000. The 2023 Snapshot confirmed that figure had been surpassed — reaching 5,031 documented kills across those two countries alone by the end of 2022. Three years on, the global picture has sharpened considerably, and it is considerably worse than the seizure numbers alone suggest.
Key figures — 2000 to April 2026
The scale of the trade in numbers
6,400+Minimum whole leopards seized globally since 2000 (EIA / India combined)
60,000+Leopard products recorded in trade 2000–2023 (CatByte / Go Insight)
738 Confirmed leopard product seizure events globally in just five years, 2020–2025
73% Of all Asian big cat specimens in trade since 2000 that are leopard (WPSI / EIA)
Sources: EIA Global Environmental Crime Tracker; CatByte (Go Insight); WPSI India annual series; CITES legal trade database 2000–2024. Open-source seizures represent approximately 20% of actual incidents. Applying the multiplier used by Indian Customs authorities (×10) to the India WPSI series 2001–2024 implies in excess of 30,000 leopard deaths in India alone over that period.
India remains the dominant source country by a significant margin. The Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) — which has maintained the most consistent long-term record — documents an average of approximately 150 to 170 leopard kills per year across 2015 to 2024, with 170 recorded in 2020, 182 in 2021, 162 in 2022, 155 in 2023, and 130 in 2024. As WPSI explicitly states, these figures represent only a fraction of actual killings. By the first quarter of 2026 alone, WPSI had already recorded 44 poaching and seizure cases against a further 122 deaths by other causes — 166 total in roughly 90 days.
“For every tiger killed, data show three to five leopards are killed. They are the most prevalent species in trade as it relates to seizures.” — Debbie Banks, Environmental Investigation Agency
Despite these figures, leopards receive a fraction of the conservation funding, political attention, and media coverage directed at tigers. This disparity is not a marginal issue — it is one of the central structural failures driving the ongoing crisis.
What Is Being Traded — and Why
Leopard body parts move through global illegal markets in four principal categories. Understanding the demand behind each is essential to understanding why the trade persists.
Skins
The most visible and historically most-seized commodity. Demand is driven by luxury status display, wealth signalling, and — historically — traditional costume in parts of Tibet and some African communities. China is the primary end market. Nepal is a key transit point.
Claws
Now the single most commonly seized commodity in recent years (CatByte 2020–2025). Easier to conceal than skins. Traded as amulets, talismans and good-luck charms. The January 2000 Khaga seizure of 18,000 claws — representing over 1,000 leopards — remains the benchmark single incident.
Bones
Third most common in recent seizure data. Driven by Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) demand. China’s Ministry of Health approved leopard bone as a substitute for tiger bone in TCM in 1993. At least 24 Chinese pharmaceutical companies still list leopard bone as an ingredient in licensed products.
Teeth / Canines
Traded as amulets, trinkets and in some spiritual/black magic contexts. Often co-seized with skins. Ease of concealment means trans-border trade in teeth is likely significantly under-detected.
Derivatives — processed products including bone wine, medicinal preparations and treated skin goods — represent the largest single trade category by volume (32% of all leopard trade 2000–2023 per CatByte). The scale of China’s licensed TCM industry involvement complicates any straightforward distinction between legal and illegal supply chains: in 2018, China’s government approved the sale of 1,230.5 kg of leopard bone to a single TCM manufacturer, with no credible account of how that volume could be legally sourced given China’s small and protected domestic leopard population.
Trophy taxidermy and the legal loopholes around it blur the boundary between legal and illegal leopard trade — a structural problem that Blood of the Leopard addresses in detail.
The landmark seizures that define the trade
The largest incidents on record establish the scale of what moves through these networks when enforcement fails to intercept it:
- Jan 2000 Khaga, Uttar Pradesh, India — 18,000 leopard claws (1,000+ animals), 70 skins, tiger parts. The Sansar Chand network. Still the largest single haul of big cat parts ever recorded.
- Apr 2003 Kathmandu, Nepal — 109 leopard skins seized. All traced to Indian source animals, all destined for China via Nepal. A textbook illustration of the India-Nepal-China pipeline.
- Oct 2003 Sangsang, Tibet Autonomous Region — 581 leopard skins and 31 tiger skins intercepted in a single truck. The largest single seizure of big cat skins on record globally. Couriers convicted; network leaders never apprehended.
- 2020 Thailand — more than 800 pieces of leopard skin seized in a single operation.
- 2023 Thailand — 296 leopard parts seized, indicating persistent major transit or processing activity in Southeast Asia.
- Apr 2026 Siliguri, West Bengal — adult male leopard skin (1.9m) intercepted at Matigara More on NH-10, destination confirmed as Nepal then China. Accused a repeat offender with prior 2023 trafficking arrest. Bail rejected. The India-Nepal-China pipeline in operation, 23 years after Kathmandu 2003.
Seized big cat claws — claws are now the single most commonly seized leopard product globally, often traded as amulets and good-luck charms.
Who Is Killing Leopards — and How
The framing of leopard killing as a single problem — “poaching” — obscures a more complex reality that Blood of the Leopard addresses directly. There are at least three distinct killing dynamics, each with different drivers, different actors, and different relationships to the trafficking chain.
Organised criminal networks
Professional poacher-trader networks operate across state and national borders, moving skins and parts through established supply chains from source areas — typically forest-adjacent communities in source states — through collection hubs to border transit points and ultimately to end markets. These networks are transnational in character, involving actors at different levels (poacher, curer, collector, transporter, broker, buyer) who may never meet. The 2026 Siliguri case — a repeat offender operating a processed skin toward the Nepal border — is a visible node in a chain whose other elements remain undetected.
Non-professional and opportunistic actors
Economic hardship, not professional criminal organisation, drives a significant proportion of leopard killings. A person who sets snares for wild boar — a legitimate pest control response to crop raiding — who catches a leopard instead faces a choice: report it, or realise its value. The value proposition of the parts market, even for damaged skins where claws and bones remain intact, makes the trafficking choice economically rational against a backdrop of rural poverty and weak enforcement. These actors are not part of organised networks but they feed them.
Retaliatory killing linked to human-leopard conflict
This is the killing category most directly within WildTiger’s operational focus — and the one with the most complex relationship to trafficking. A leopard that takes livestock is sometimes killed in retaliation. That killing may be opportunistic, emotionally driven, and carried out by someone with no prior criminal intent. But once the animal is dead, the parts have value — and the same networks that source professionally poached material will accept opportunistically killed animals. The retaliatory kill and the trafficked part are two moments in the same chain, separated only by the circumstances of the kill.
Human-Leopard Conflict: The Hidden Pipeline
Human-leopard conflict is often discussed as a conservation problem in its own right — and it is. But its connection to the illegal body parts trade is less frequently acknowledged, and it is a connection that WildTiger’s field operations have encountered directly and repeatedly.
What conflict looks like on the ground
Leopards in South Asia increasingly inhabit landscapes that are not wilderness — they live in and around agricultural land, community forests, plantation edges and village margins. In Nepal’s mid-hills and Terai buffer zones, in the sugarcane-growing areas around Bardiya, and in the high-altitude grazing corridors of the Annapurna Conservation Area, leopards and people share space under conditions of growing tension. Livestock losses — goats, dogs, cattle calves — are the primary flashpoint. A single leopard killing a herder’s goats may represent a significant proportion of that household’s annual income. The emotional and economic pressure that creates is real and must be understood rather than dismissed. these dynamics are particularly prevalent in many parts of India especially in the sugarcane belt of Uttar Pradesh.
When conflict becomes trafficking
The pathway from conflict kill to traded part is well-documented in India and Nepal’s national wildlife synthesis research: leopards killed in retaliatory actions are suspected to enter the illicit wildlife trade, with poachers known to benefit from increasing public resentment toward leopards. The mechanism is straightforward. A community that kills a leopard in retaliation may not know how to access the parts market directly — but someone in the network does, and word travels. Parts move from retaliatory kills through the same channels as parts from targeted poaching. Poisoning — often used as a retaliatory method because it is cheap, accessible and leaves no ballistic evidence — is particularly associated with this pathway. A poisoned leopard may have a damaged or decomposed skin unsuitable for the premium skin market, but its claws, teeth and bones retain their value entirely.
WildTiger’s field team in the Annapurna Conservation Area in April 2026 encountered a case consistent with this pathway: a leopard suspected to have been poisoned in a conflict context, with evidence suggesting its parts subsequently entered the trafficking network. This incident — and others like it from LeopardEye deployments — form part of the evidence base for Blood of the Leopard.
The ecosystem cost
Removing leopards from functioning ecosystems has consequences that extend far beyond the individual animal. Leopards regulate prey populations — wild boar, deer, monkeys — that themselves create significant agricultural damage. Communities that kill leopards in retaliation for livestock losses may, over time, experience greater crop losses from unchecked boar and primate populations. This feedback loop is rarely visible at the household level, which is why coexistence work — WildTiger‘s primary operational mission — requires engagement with both the immediate conflict dynamics and the longer-term ecological reality.
This leopard died after being caught in a snare set for wild boar in west Nepal in 2022. Snares set for crop-raiding animals represent one of the pathways by which non-targeted killing feeds the body parts market — the skin may be damaged, but claws, teeth and bones retain their full value to traffickers.
Threats to the Leopard: The Full Picture
The following summary draws on the original Snapshot framework and updates it with the current understanding of the threat landscape:
- Illegal body parts trade — The primary focus of Blood of the Leopard. Persistent, transnational, and structurally embedded in supply chains that connect village-level actors to international end markets. India is the dominant source country; Nepal, Myanmar and Vietnam are key transit points; China is the primary end market.
- Human-wildlife conflict — The growing interface between expanding human populations and leopard habitat generates retaliatory killing that feeds the trafficking chain. In South Asia, conflict is most acute in Terai buffer zones, mid-hill agricultural landscapes and high-altitude grazing areas.
- Habitat loss and fragmentation — Conversion of forest to agriculture, plantation and settlement pushes leopards into human-dominated landscapes, increasing conflict frequency and reducing connectivity between populations.
- Demand from Traditional Chinese Medicine — China’s licensed TCM industry provides both a market for leopard bone and a legal infrastructure that creates laundering opportunities for illegally sourced material. Structural reform of this system remains the single most impactful demand-side intervention available.
- Enforcement failure and deterrence deficit — Conviction rates for wildlife trafficking in South Asia are low; sentences where convictions occur are often insufficient to deter re-offending. The 2026 Siliguri case involved a repeat offender whose prior 2023 arrest had not removed him from active trafficking. The 26-year prosecution gap in the landmark 2000 Khaga case, with convictions only secured in 2026, illustrates systemic failures.
- Climate change — Altered prey availability, shifting habitat suitability, and increased human-wildlife overlap as communities adapt to climate stress all affect leopard populations. High-altitude populations face specific pressures as climate change compresses suitable habitat zones.
- Subspecies invisibility — CITES groups all leopard subspecies together in its trade database, preventing accurate subspecies-level analysis. The Javan leopard (Panthera pardus melas), with approximately 350 individuals remaining, faces extinction-level trafficking pressure that is analytically invisible in global data.
Coming — Mid 2026
Blood of the Leopard — The Report
A major new body of work from WildTiger, drawing on 25 years of seizure data, field intelligence, collaboration with different partners and analysis of policy developments including CITES CoP20 (November 2025). Blood of the Leopard will be the most comprehensive public account of the leopard body parts crisis yet produced. This page will be updated on publication.
WildTiger’s Commitment
WildTiger applies technology-assisted monitoring (LeopardEye) to both human-leopard conflict mitigation and counter-poaching intelligence. The platform operates in collaboration with community-level partners, government forest and wildlife authorities, and regional enforcement networks.
The core insight behind LeopardEye is that coexistence and anti-trafficking are not separate problems. A community that experiences less conflict, and that has structured channels for reporting wildlife crime, is a community less likely to generate the retaliatory kills that feed the parts network. Addressing the trafficking crisis requires engagement at the community level as much as at the enforcement level.
WildTiger remains committed to both sustaining leopard populations and the rights of each individual leopard. The trafficking of leopard body parts is a deadly serious crime. Blood of the Leopard is our most detailed public accounting of that crime to date — and of what must change if the pattern documented across this century is to be broken.
Mission Leopard was founded by WildTiger | Jack Kinross on Substack
© Mission Leopard / WildTiger 2026