Tibetan Wolves: Long-ranging Drifters of the Changthang
Photo StoryPublished : Jun 01, 2022Updated : Sep 29, 2023
Tibetan wolves are one of the top predators of the high Himalayas in Ladakh. Unfortunately, they have long been persecuted and considered a bad omen
Text by: Abhishek Ghoshal
Tibetan wolves are one of the top predators of the high Himalayas in Ladakh. Unfortunately, they have long been persecuted and considered a bad omen
The cold desert of Ladakh has bare mountains and scarce, thinly distributed vegetation. At an average altitude of 4,700 m, food is scarce, and wild animals occur at low densities due to limited resources and extreme weather. Not many creatures are evolutionarily equipped to call this kind of environment home. But for Tibetan wolves (Canis lupus chanco), Ladakh’s Changthang region is home ground.
Here, wolves are the top predators alongside snow leopards (Panthera uncia). As social animals, wolves function and hunt in packs. They are efficient predators of large-bodied herbivores like the Tibetan wild ass or kiang (Equus kiang) and the Tibetan argali or nyan (Ovis ammon). At times, wolves kill local livestock such as yaks, horses, donkeys, sheep, and goats. Such livestock depredation, especially when frequent and involving mass mortality (when a large number are killed in a single incident) of livestock in an area, brings wolves into confrontation with the local communities. Wolves fall prey to traditional traps, locally called shangdong — from shangku meaning wolf and dong meaning trap — or their kill may be poisoned. Sometimes, if villagers discover a wolf den near their village or grazing grounds it is considered a bad omen. They may smoke the den and kill the pups.
Although wolves receive the highest level of legal protection in India and are included in Appendix I of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), they are one of the least protected and understood species. As part of a long-term conservation initiative, people in parts of Ladakh have neutralised shangdongs (made them ineffective) and built Buddhist stupas alongside them at sites like Chushul, Rumptse, and Himya. At the community level, people in these areas are now committed to not killing wolves anymore. This kind of community-led conservation effort has the potential to keep the “roof of the world” safe for Tibetan wolves.
The high-altitude plains and undulating mountains of the Changthang in eastern Ladakh form the perfect habitat for Tibetan wolves. They maintain large home ranges across vast stretches with different kinds of prey. The valleys, plains, and plateaus of the Changthang support bharal or blue sheep (Pseudois nayaur), Tibetan argali, kiang, and Tibetan gazelle or goa (Procapra picticaudata) among large-bodied herbivores, as well as small-bodied herbivores like marmots (Marmota spp.) and pika (Ochotona spp.). Photo: Saurabh Sawant
Cover photo: Kedar Bhide
Wolves are social animals that usually live in packs. However, lone individuals might occasionally be seen drifting across the windswept, arid landscape — perhaps they are patrolling territories or searching for prey or a mate. Tibetan wolves have yellowish-white fur on the faces, bellies, and limbs with a crest of black fur running from the head down to about two-thirds of the back. Their tails have thick, woolly earthy-brown fur. During the summer, their coats sometimes turn black.
Weighing around 30-35 kg, Tibetan wolves are larger than their peninsular counterparts, Indian wolves. Adults are about 110 cm in length and around 76 cm tall at the shoulder. Belonging to the dog or Canid family, high-altitude wolves occur in Ladakh and Spiti, Himachal Pradesh in India, as well as in Tibet and Nepal. The Tibetan wolf is also considered the oldest of all wolves, having diverged from other Canids around 800,000 years ago. Photos: Dhritiman Mukherjee (top and above left), Kedar Bhide (above right)
Wolves are known to use high-level cooperative hunting strategies and may form large packs of 8-10 individuals. Pack-living wolves have the edge over solitary carnivores at high altitudes as this allows them to hunt down much larger wild and domesticated prey. This behavioural adaptation helps wolves, at the individual and pack level, minimise effort and maximise benefits from a kill in this oxygen-deficient and resource-scarce environment. Since wolves are best fitted for running in open and undulating terrain, most of their hunting happens in wide-open spaces, such as mountain slopes, pastures, or relatively flat areas beside rivers or lakes. This is unlike other co-existing large predators, such as snow leopards, which use an ambush strategy for hunting in cliff-dominated terrain. Photos: Surya Ramachandran (top), Kedar Bhide (above)
The Changthang supports millions of livestock. The local community, the Chang-pa, mainly lead a nomadic pastoral life. Cashmere or pashmina goats are their economic mainstay. Intense livestock grazing, especially of small-bodied livestock like goat or sheep, remove large amounts of forage from the pastures. This often leads to lowering the forage availability for wild herbivores, such as bharal, argali, and gazelle, which in turn restricts their distribution and suppresses or lowers their populations. Therefore, in areas of low availability of wild prey, carnivores like wolves and snow leopards end up killing livestock as they are easy prey. This puts the carnivores at risk of retaliatory killing by humans via poison baiting and den-smoking — this is especially true in cases of mass mortality of livestock. Photos: Abhishek Ghoshal (left), Surya Ramachandran (right)
Free-ranging dogs have emerged as a major threat to human health, biodiversity, and livestock in the Indian Himalayas. Dogs kill more livestock than wild carnivores. Often livestock killed by dogs is misinterpreted as the kill of snow leopards or wolves, and the carcass is poisoned to remove wild carnivores from the area. Snow leopards, wolves, or red foxes scavenging on such poisoned kill die. Additionally, being similar in body size and behaviour, dogs and wolves compete for resources. Breeding between wild wolves and free-ranging dogs is another poorly understood issue with the possibility of hybridisation of wolf populations (right). Photos: Abhishek Ghoshal (left), Surya Ramachandran (right)
Traditionally, the people of the Changthang have used wolf traps (shandongs) to manage wolves and protect livestock. Shandongs are large pits, 3-4.5 m in diameter and 2.5-3 m in depth, with inverted funnel-shaped stone walls. The trap, once baited with livestock, attracts wolves; once inside, the wolf cannot get out of the pit. The trapped animal would be pelted to death, and the carcass carried around to nearby villages to collect a reward. However, since 2017-2018, such wolf traps have been neutralised in parts of the Indian Changthang, and instead, Buddhist stupas have been built in some locations to rinse away sins accumulated from trapping and killing these animals for centuries. Locals have committed not to kill wolves in those regions ever again. Led by the local people with support from the Nature Conservation Foundation, monastery associations, local religious leaders, and the Wildlife Protection Department, this initiative integrates Buddhist principles of respect for all living beings with wildlife conservation. Such conservation efforts should be able to keep the Changthang safe not only for Tibetan wolves but also for other wild carnivores that live in here. Photos: Abhishek Ghoshal (top), Surya Ramachandran (above)
About the contributor
Abhishek Ghoshal
is a wildlife biologist. He heads the Human-Wildlife Conflict Mitigation Division at Wildlife Trust of India (WTI).
