Hi mj75: thats very kind of you. You know actually Smullery took the words out of my mouth, he is absolutely right , we have introduced a community based trophy hunting programme where 80% of the revenue generated from the hunt goes to the local villagers who in return do not need to kill these animals for food and they also protect the animals from poachers who are obviously poaching because they cannot afford to pay the trophy fees. There was a time when only 300 recorded markhor were left in Pakistan this is when the Pakistani govt. Introduced community based hunting programme. Today the number has risen to 3000 as recorded by wwf. On the other hand if you look at India where there is a total ban on hunting yet the numbers of tigers are falling manly because of poaching.
Same goes for the snow leopard which is strictly protected in Pakistan but because of that there was a time when the numbers suddenly increased and more and more incidents were reported of the leopards attacking the livestock of the villagers, now vengeance is a natural trait of all human beings since then the villagers started hunting the snow leopards indiscriminately making the population dangerously low. However if the Pakistan govt. Had introduced a similar community based hunting programme for the leopard than the situation would have been much better by now.the same people who are poaching these animals would be protecting them. Its very sad but do you know that he original habitat of the marcopolo sheep currently found in the pamirs was in Pakistan. Unfortunately in the 80s a military dictator was ruling Pakistan and he did not have the sense to introduce a trophy hunting law for these beautiful creatures, as a result the animals moved further north into Tajikistan etc due to large scale poaching.