WildTiger

#AntiSnare – End the silent trap

Currently at WildTiger a key focus is #AntiSnare. Please read below to understand how #AntiSnare integrates with our overall work scope. You can also go through the menu for specifics. This site works in tandem with Mission Leopard at wildleopard.net

Hundreds of millions of snares are active across Africa and Asia at any one time. They are cheap, invisible, and indiscriminate. They kill leopards, tigers, elephants, and thousands of other species without distinction. They operate in subsistence economies and organised crime networks simultaneously. The snare is the most widespread and under-reported driver of wildlife death on the planet. #AntiSnare exists to change that.

40M+Snares set annually in Central Africa aloneDenny et al., BioScience 2025

12.3MSnares in protected areas, Mekong regionWWF Silence of the Snares

700+Mammal species impacted in Southeast AsiaWWF-TRAFFIC

93%Of leopard snaring occurs outside protected areasWWF-TRAFFIC Big Cats briefing

The global snaring crisis

A planetary scale – Below the radar

Snaring is not a marginal or localised issue. It is a planetary-scale threat to wildlife that operates largely below the radar of mainstream conservation discourse — precisely because it is low-tech, low-visibility, and deeply embedded in both subsistence and commercial supply chains. The clearest picture emerges from two geographic epicentres.

Africa

Hundreds of millions of devices

The 2025 BioScience paper by Denny et al. is the most comprehensive synthesis to date. Individual hunters in Central Africa operate between 60 and 100 snares at a time; commercial hunters run up to 500 simultaneously. The aggregate minimum estimate: probably over 40 million snares set in Central Africa annually, with the actual figure potentially reaching hundreds of millions across the continent.

The wastage dimension is staggering. Hunters discard around 8–10% of ensnared animals, meaning at least tens of millions of kilograms — possibly more than 100 million kilograms — of wild meat goes to waste every year. The snare kills far more than it intends to.

Southeast Asia

The Mekong crisis zone

WWF’s Silence of the Snares report established the regional baseline. An estimated 12.3 million snares threaten wildlife in the protected areas of Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Vietnam alone — covering only a portion of the region’s total protected areas. More than 200,000 snares were removed from just five protected areas between 2010 and 2015.

The outcome in the Mekong core states is irreversible: tigers are now functionally extinct in Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Vietnam. In Malaysia’s Belum-Temengor complex — one of the region’s most critical remaining tiger landscapes — tiger numbers declined by 50% between 2009 and 2018, largely due to widespread snaring.

South Asia — India & Nepal

The leopard snare toll

A Karnataka-based study documented 113 incidents of leopards caught in snares between January 2009 and December 2020, of which 59.3% resulted in leopard mortality — averaging 5.5 deaths per year from snaring in that study area alone. WPSI-compiled data records 24 tigers and 110 leopards lost to wire traps between 2010 and 2018.

Monsoon seasonality intensifies the toll. Snaring surges during the peak cropping period when farmers intensify protection of crops and livestock, with a higher number of leopards becoming victims during the rains. The Nepal-India border corridor — sheltering tigers, leopards, elephants, and rhinos across six protected areas — is among the highest-risk zones.

The structural problem

Removal alone does not work

Snares are cheap to produce and easy to set in large numbers. The number removed is likely only a small fraction of total snares present across any given landscape. Crucially, due to the low opportunity cost of replacing snares, removal alone is largely ineffective. Without the proactive search, arrest, and prosecution of snare-setters — alongside genuine livelihood alternatives — snares will simply be replaced.

Detection is particularly acute at the agricultural-forest interface where, as WWF-TRAFFIC data confirms, 93% of leopard snaring occurs outside protected area boundaries, where patrol infrastructure is minimal or absent.

“A wire loop set for a barking deer kills a tiger with equal efficiency. The snare does not distinguish. That is precisely what makes it so destructive.”WildTiger — #AntiSnare Campaign

What happens in a snare

The mechanics of a slow death

A snare is a loop of wire — typically braided steel cable, fencing wire, or nylon cord — anchored to a stake or tree, set at throat or leg height along an animal trail. When a big cat moves through it, the loop tightens. What follows is not quick. It is a sequence of physical events that can extend across hours or days, each stage compounding the last.

It is important to understand this sequence plainly, without abstraction. The snare is not a trap that merely detains. For a large cat, it is almost always fatal — and the process by which it kills is one of the most prolonged and violent deaths that a wild animal can experience.

Capture & Initial Struggle

The loop closes on a leg, paw, neck, or body as the animal moves forward. The cat’s immediate response is explosive — a powerful lunge to escape. This is the moment the snare does its first damage. The wire, under the full force of a panicked big cat’s bodyweight and muscle, cuts through fur and into skin. If the snare is a neck snare, the initial struggle can crush the trachea or compress the carotid arteries within minutes. If it catches a limb, the wire begins sawing through tissue with each movement.

Tissue Damage & Bone

A big cat does not stop struggling. Unlike smaller animals that may exhaust quickly, large felids fight the snare repeatedly — in waves of effort separated by exhaustion. Each bout of struggle drives the wire deeper. Soft tissue is the first to fail: the loop cuts through muscle and fascia, exposing bone. In limb snares, the wire eventually reaches and can fracture or sever bone entirely. In neck snares, sustained tightening crushes the larynx and cervical vertebrae. The pain at this stage is severe and continuous.

Infection & Systemic Collapse

If the animal survives the initial capture phase — and many do, for hours or days — the wound becomes the next threat. The wire creates an anaerobic environment in the tissue it penetrates: ideal conditions for bacterial proliferation. Gangrene sets in rapidly in tropical temperatures. Septicaemia follows as infection enters the bloodstream. The animal’s immune system, already compromised by stress hormones and blood loss, cannot contain it. Body temperature destabilises. Organ systems begin to fail. The animal is still alive throughout this process.

Starvation & Dehydration

A snared big cat cannot hunt. It cannot move to water. In hot, humid tropical conditions, dehydration accelerates organ failure within 24 to 48 hours. An animal that is not killed by the wire wound itself — and many are not — dies of thirst while anchored to a stake. This is the commonest outcome for animals caught in remotely set snares that are checked infrequently. The animal may be alive when the snare-setter returns. It may not. Either outcome follows the same trajectory.

The total duration from capture to death ranges from several hours for a neck snare that closes quickly, to three or four days for an animal caught by a limb in a remotely placed trap. Veterinary assessments of recovered big cats — those found alive by rangers and removed from snares — consistently document severe wire injuries penetrating to bone, advanced septicaemia, and irreversible soft tissue loss requiring amputation or resulting in euthanasia. Survival rates for big cats removed from snares are low even with immediate veterinary intervention.

The snare-setter is typically not present. The animal dies alone, anchored, unable to move more than the length of the wire. This is what a snare does. This is what #AntiSnare exists to stop.

Species impact

Indiscriminate, Cascading

The defining characteristic of the snare is its complete non-selectivity. A wire loop set for a barking deer kills a tiger with equal efficiency. The ecological consequences compound across species and landscapes in ways that outlast the snares themselves.

Tiger

The greatest regional threat

Snares are now considered the greatest threat to the long-term presence of tigers in Southeast Asia. Tigers are functionally extinct in Cambodia, Lao PDR, and Vietnam — snares implicated both in direct mortality and in the collapse of their prey base. In Malaysia’s Belum-Temengor complex, tiger numbers fell 50% between 2009 and 2018.

Leopard

The most prevalent victim

93% of leopard snaring cases occur outside protected areas — at the conflict-agriculture interface where patrol infrastructure is minimal. A majority of these animals enter the snare as bycatch of snares set for ungulates or bushmeat. Once dead, their parts enter trafficking networks. The Karnataka study average: 5.5 leopard deaths per year from snaring in one study area alone.

Wider ecosystem

700+ species, the empty forest

More than 700 mammal species are impacted by snares in Southeast Asia alone, including the Asian elephant, Sumatran rhinoceros, saola, and banteng. The ecological outcome of sustained snaring at scale is defaunation — the functional emptying of otherwise intact-looking forest. Habitat quality decouples from wildlife presence. Protected areas become hollow.

Snaring & wildlife trafficking

The entry point to the supply chain

Snaring and the illegal wildlife trade are not parallel problems. They are convergent. The snare is the point of acquisition for trafficking networks: what begins as a bushmeat trap becomes a leopard pelt, a bag of claws, a consignment of bones. The growing illegal wildlife trade — estimated at around US$20 billion annually — is driving the deliberate use of snares to acquire high-demand species including tigers, leopards, and pangolins.

In South Asia, this connection is direct and documented. A leopard killed in a snare — whether targeted or bycatch — enters the same parts market as a leopard killed by a professional poaching network. The India-Nepal-China pipeline for leopard skins, claws, and bones has operated continuously since the 1990s. A skin intercepted in Siliguri, West Bengal in April 2026 — en route to Nepal then China — is a present-day example of that network.

This IWT-snaring nexus is particularly under-analysed in South Asia relative to Southeast Asia. Addressing snaring purely as a conservation or bushmeat problem, without acknowledging its role as an IWT acquisition mechanism, understates the urgency. Blood of the Leopard — WildTiger’s forthcoming report, launching 1 June 2026 — addresses this in full.

WildTiger’s response

What we do on the ground

WildTiger works across various landscapes, combining technology, community engagement, and intelligence-led awareness to address the snare crisis at its source. Our premise: reducing human-wildlife conflict reduces the conditions in which snaring and trafficking begin.

Technology

LeopardEye

LeopardEye is our AI-enhanced early warning system monitors big cat movements in conflict hotspots, alerting communities before encounters escalate. Integrating satellite and terrestrial systems, LeopardEye is central to coexistence strategy throughout 2026 and reduces the conditions that lead to retaliatory snaring.

Intelligence

Blood of the Leopard

Our landmark report — drawing on CITES COP data, WPSI seizure records, EIA intelligence, and field experience — maps the scale of the leopard crisis including snaring mortality with granularity that headline figures cannot provide. Launching 1 June 2026.

Community

Conflict mitigation

Alternative livelihoods, livestock protection programmes, and community-based deterrents reduce the conditions that lead to snare-setting and retaliatory killing. Addressing the economic logic of snaring requires viable alternatives, not enforcement alone.

Education

Youth for Coexistence

The Youth for Human-Wildlife Coexistence (YHWC) Network builds the next generation of informed coexistence advocates across South Asia — young people who understand the leopard as a barometer of ecosystem health, not a threat to be controlled with a wire.

Advocacy

#AntiSnare campaign

#AntiSnare is a call to name what is happening, to spread the data, and to build the political and public will needed to address structural failures in enforcement, funding, and international cooperation on snaring as both a wildlife crime and a trafficking mechanism.

Research

Mission Leopard

WildTiger’s dedicated leopard initiative brings together field intelligence, partner data, and conservation science to produce the most comprehensive account of leopard status in South Asia — including snaring mortality data — available outside institutional databases.

From the field

The reality on the ground

From WildTiger Coordinator Jack Kinross and the broader landscape of field documentation.

“There is a moment — known to anyone who has stood in genuine wilderness — when a big cat passes through your world. It does not acknowledge you. It does not need to. In that instant something in the human animal remembers what it has spent centuries trying to forget: that we are not separate from the wild. We never were.” Jack Kinross — WildTiger Coordinator

“Snares impact more than 700 mammal species in Southeast Asia. They are now the greatest threat to the long-term presence of tigers in the region. The outcome in the Mekong core states is irreversible.” WWF — Silence of the Snares

“Leopards in South Asia increasingly inhabit landscapes that are not wilderness. Livestock losses are the primary flashpoint. The emotional and economic pressure that creates is real and must be understood — because it is the condition in which snares get set.” Blood of the Leopard — Preview, April 2026

“Due to the low opportunity cost of replacing snares, removal alone is largely ineffective. Without the proactive search, arrest, and prosecution of snare-setters, along with incentives not to snare, snares will simply be replaced.” WWF-TRAFFIC — Snaring of Big Cats in Mainland Asia

#AntiSnare

Join the campaign

Use the hashtag. Share the data. Support the work. The snare is invisible by design — our job is to make it visible. Read the Substack, support WildTiger’s field operations (LeopardEye), and spread the word that the snaring crisis is real, documented, and addressable.