Number of Rare Animals Has Dwindled, Thanks to Man and Progress : In the Mountains of Pakistan, Marco Polo Sheep Are Facing Extinction

The Karakoram Highway has become the narrow, winding path to progress in Pakistan’s once-isolated northern areas, but it is proving to be a dangerous road for the rare animals living in some of the world’s highest mountains.

Marco Polo came through here in 1273 and called it the most difficult part of his wide wanderings.

In “The Travels,” he described the great wild animals that now bear his name: Marco Polo sheep.

“Here is the best pasturage in the world: for a lean beast grows fat in 10 days. Wild game of every sort abound. There are great quantities of wild sheep of huge size. Their horns grow as much as six palms in size.”

Sheep Are Threatened

But now, near the Khunjerab Pass, where the Karakoram Highway rises to 16,072 feet and enters China, Marco Polo’s sheep are threatened with extermination as humans and progress move in.

“We have been failing to control the poaching,” said an official of Pakistan’s national park service. “In two to three years, they will be extinguished if there is no change.”

The sheep are prized trophies--the males weigh as much as 300 pounds and carry flaring, curved horns up to six feet long. But they and other animals are also killed for food, or simply because they are in the way of progress.

“We have problems with military officials using sophisticated arms. Also with the police forces,” said the parks official, who fears retaliation if identified. “In an area where there was nothing 20 years ago you have over 200 constables stationed at the Khunjerab, and all of them have weapons.”

‘Road Shootings’ Common

No one knows for sure how many sheep remain, but some estimates say about 200.

In the first three months of 1980, two years after the highway opened, there were 340 Marco Polo sightings in the Khunjerab. This year only 63 have been recorded.

“Road shootings” were common during construction of the 795-mile highway, which connects Pakistan’s capital of Islamabad with Kashgar, in western China. One naturalist reported incidents in which military officers hunted with automatic weapons from helicopters.

Raj Bahadur Ali Khan, director of the Khunjerab National Park, refused to comment on reports of poaching by soldiers.

‘All Guesswork’

“We can’t detect what happens when a helicopter goes up there. It’s all guesswork,” he said during an interview.

Ghulam Rasul, wildlife warden for the area, has only 33 rangers to cover 27,000 square miles of steep valleys, high glaciers and many mountains that tower above 25,000 feet. Only three are assigned to the 877-square-mile Khunjerab National Park.

“We have no guns, no arms. Just a walking stick,” said Rasul.

Not all species are equally threatened. Ibex, which live on high pinnacles, are safest. Snow leopards and wolves are hurt when humans kill their prey. The Ladakh Urial, a small sheep that lives in open country, suffer the most.

Affected by Progress

“I have seen soldiers chasing them with stones in the fields near Skardu,” said a naturalist who fears that he would not be allowed to return to the area if identified.

Skardu used to be 10 days by horseback from the nearest railhead. Now the town, which serves as a climbers’ base for K-2, the second highest mountain in the world, is 15 hours by car from the densely populated plains of Punjab, and the effects of progress are visible everywhere.

Small water-power projects dot the valleys, and electric light and refrigeration are beginning to reach even the highest mountain villages. Gilgit, once a small town presided over by a single British political agent, is now a city of 40,000.

“The Karakoram Highway brings everything,” said a parks official. “The side effect is that these animals are being destroyed.”

Wildlife Refuge Urged

The military presence makes wildlife information hard to gather in the tense strategic triangle where Afghanistan, the Soviet Union, China, Pakistan and India come together. A 1977 article in a Soviet journal said that Marco Polo sheep, on the Soviet Union’s endangered species list, are dwindling because herdsmen want pasture for domesticated sheep, cows and goats.

The author, A.I. Sokov, also noted that “the proximity of roads has a strong effect on the population” and called for establishment of a wildlife preserve in the Pamir Mountains.

Valerius Geist, a professor at Canada’s University of Calgary in Alberta, said similar problems plagued the sheep during the 1970s in Afghanistan’s Wakhan Corridor, where the Pamirs run south to Pakistan.

“Herdsmen would gut-shoot them, then chase them down with dogs,” Geist said. “They view the Marco Polo sheep as competition.” Since the Soviets moved into Afghanistan and a guerrilla war started in 1979, he said, “They have very likely been annihilated.”

Intelligent Beasts

Highways in themselves can be beneficial if there is no hunting. The rights of way provide grazing and are free of predators, while winter road salting provides salt when it’s hardest to get.

“They are intelligent beasts and recognize very quickly a harmless human being,” said Geist. “They’ll take advantage of the highway.”

Heavily hunted sheep, however, are suspicious of all humans. Bighorn sheep in the American West show fast heartbeats an hour after human contact, even if they seem to be resting. The stress opens them to parasites and diseases such as pneumonia, said Michael Hutchins, a mammalogist at New York’s Bronx Zoo.

Hutchins and Geist support a trophy hunting system focusing on the largest Marco Polo males.

Bidding Would Be High

“You could get $20,000 from American hunters, any time of the day,” said Geist. It would be cost-effective land use, create an interest in letting the animals grow to maturity and give the villagers a decent cut of the profits.

Other naturalists say bidding could go as high as $50,000 a head because the sheep are among the world’s most magnificent big game trophies. One hunter was willing to climb cliffs “hand over hand” for four days in 1959 to see 65 rams marching single-file through the Khunjerab Pass.

“My heart was in my throat, and my hands started trembling so badly I had to lower the binoculars,” the hunter, Elgin T. Gates, later wrote. He was the first Westerner in 30 years to lay eyes on the Marco Polo; he shot five of them.