Snow leopards inhabit high-altitude Central Asian mountain ranges where habitat loss, prey depletion, and retaliatory killing create an increasingly difficult welfare environment.
Snow leopard welfare in a warming, shrinking range involves the chronic stress of declining prey availability, increasing livestock conflict as prey scarcity pushes snow leopards to take easier targets, and retaliatory killing that removes individuals from an already sparse population. The isolation of their high-altitude habitat means that each individual snow leopard lost has outsized population consequences. Climate change is transforming their habitat faster than any other snow leopard threat, making this one of the most clear examples of climate as an animal welfare crisis.