Trophy Hunting in Gilgit-Baltistan: The Conservation Story

Here is a sentence that surprises almost every visitor: one of the most effective wildlife conservation programs in the Himalaya-Karakoram region is funded by trophy hunting. Since the 1990s, Pakistan has run a community-based trophy hunting program in Gilgit-Baltistan and neighbouring regions, sanctioned by CITES — the international convention regulating wildlife trade — through official export quotas.

The logic is blunt economics. For mountain villages, wild goats and sheep were once competitors for grazing and an easy source of meat; animals had negative value, and unregulated hunting pushed species like the markhor toward the edge. The program flipped the equation: a tiny number of regulated hunts now generates serious money that flows directly to the villages that protect the animals, making a living markhor herd worth far more than a poached one.

This guide explains how the system works, what it has achieved, where the money goes, and the genuine ethical debate around it. We present it factually — it is Pakistan's legal, internationally recognised program, it has produced measurable conservation results, and it also raises questions that deserve honest treatment rather than marketing gloss.

Each season, the authorities issue a small number of permits for three species: the Astore markhor (the wild goat with the famous spiralling horns), the Himalayan ibex, and the blue sheep of the high Baltistan plateaus. Markhor permits are the rarest and most valuable — Pakistan's CITES export quota allows only a handful of markhor trophies nationally per year — while ibex permits are more numerous and far cheaper.

Permits are auctioned to the highest bidders, most of them international hunters, and markhor permits have repeatedly fetched well over US$100,000 each, with record bids climbing higher in recent seasons. Crucially, roughly 80 percent of the permit fee goes directly to the village conservancy on whose land the hunt takes place, with the remainder retained by the wildlife department.

The rules are strict by design: only aged males past their prime breeding years may be taken, hunts are accompanied by wildlife department staff and local guides, and quotas are tied to population surveys. One old male per valley per season is the scale we're talking about — this is not commercial hunting pressure, but a high-priced, tightly rationed exception to a general ban.

The headline outcome is hard to argue with. Markhor populations in Pakistan's program areas recovered strongly over the decades the system has operated — enough that in 2015 the IUCN downlisted the species globally from Endangered to Near Threatened, an improvement in which Pakistan's community conservancies played a leading, internationally acknowledged role.

Himalayan ibex, the program's workhorse species, are now a common sight in protected valleys — winter visitors to Hunza routinely watch herds grazing low slopes near Khyber and Passu, something old hunters say would have been unthinkable a generation ago. Blue sheep populations in the program's Baltistan areas have likewise held stable or grown.

The mechanism behind the numbers is simple: poaching collapsed. When a valley's markhor became a community asset worth six figures, villages began policing their own mountainsides — and a poacher stopped being a provider and became a thief stealing from every household's share. Former hunters, who know the animals' habits best, were hired as the first community game watchers.

The program's foundations are village conservancies — community institutions that manage a defined area of wildlife habitat, conduct watch-and-ward patrols, and receive the hunting revenue. In Gojal (upper Hunza), Khyber village runs one of the best-known ibex conservancies, and the villages around Khunjerab organised early to co-manage wildlife on the park's fringes.

In Baltistan, the Skoyo–Karabathang–Basingo (SKB) conservancy on the Indus near Skardu is a flagship for markhor: three small villages whose combined territory now holds one of the healthiest Astore markhor populations anywhere. The Bunji and Astore areas along the Indus and Astore valleys host further markhor conservancies, several of which have hosted the country's record-priced hunts.

Conservancy committees — village elders, often with support from conservation NGOs and the Gilgit-Baltistan wildlife department — decide how funds are spent and who patrols. The model's quiet revolution is governance: wildlife decisions that were once made (and ignored) in distant offices are now made in village meetings by people who live with the consequences.

Walk through a conservancy village and the hunting revenue is visible. Communities have spent their shares on schools and scholarship funds, basic health clinics and ambulances, micro-hydro plants that brought reliable electricity to off-grid hamlets, irrigation channels, and link roads — infrastructure that mountain villages could otherwise wait decades for.

A share also goes back into conservation itself: salaries for community wildlife rangers, winter feed for wild herds in hard years, and the regular population surveys on which quotas depend. In several conservancies the ranger job is a respected, salaried position — often filled by exactly the men who once hunted the same slopes illegally.

The social effect compounds. Because every household has a stake in the revenue, protecting wildlife became a shared norm rather than an imposed rule, and conservancies now guard their valleys with a vigilance no government department could afford to buy. It is community ownership, not enforcement, that did the heavy lifting.

The hunting season runs through the cold months, roughly November to April, when the animals descend to lower winter ranges and old males can be identified and judged accurately through spotting scopes. A permitted hunt is a slow, supervised affair: days of glassing slopes with community guides and wildlife department staff to locate a specific class of aged male before any shot is considered.

The hunter pays for far more than the permit — outfitters, guides, porters and village services all earn from each expedition, spreading the benefit beyond the formal 80 percent share. After a successful hunt, measurements and documentation go to the wildlife department, and CITES export paperwork is required before any trophy leaves Pakistan.

Everything outside this narrow channel remains illegal. The program coexists with a general hunting ban, and the same community rangers who guide permitted hunts spend the rest of the year enforcing it — which is precisely why the system works as conservation rather than as a loophole.

Reasonable people object to trophy hunting, and the objections deserve stating plainly: many find it morally wrong to kill a rare, magnificent animal for sport at any price, and argue that conservation should never depend on the deaths of the creatures it protects. Critics also question auction culture, ask whether photo tourism could replace the revenue, and warn against complacency in quota-setting.

The counter-argument rests on outcomes. The program's defenders — including many conservation scientists — point out that the species recovered where the program operated and continued declining where it didn't; that removing a few post-breeding males has negligible biological cost; and that no alternative funding source has yet matched the revenue, reliability or community buy-in that the permits generate in these remote valleys.

Both positions are held in good faith, and you don't have to resolve the debate to understand the program. What's beyond dispute is the empirical record: more markhor, more ibex, functioning village institutions and a poaching collapse across the conservancies. Whether that end justifies these means is a question each traveller can weigh — with the facts, rather than with caricatures of them.

Here's the practical upshot for the 99.9 percent of visitors who will never bid on a permit: Gilgit-Baltistan's slopes now carry thriving, increasingly relaxed populations of ibex and markhor that you can watch and photograph. Winter and early spring are prime time, when herds graze low along the Hunza and Indus valleys — scan the slopes around Khyber, Passu and the Skardu road and you'll find them.

The recovery feeds the region's most charismatic predator. Ibex and markhor are the snow leopard's main prey here, and a rebuilt prey base is widely credited with supporting healthy snow leopard numbers in the Karakoram — the foundation on which our snow-leopard-winter-expedition and wildlife photography trips are built. More wild goats means more cats, and more chances of the encounter of a lifetime.

If the subject interests you, it's worth reading our trophy hunting experience page for how regulated expeditions are arranged, even if only to understand what your conservancy hosts mean when they talk about 'the program'. Ask about it in Khyber or Skoyo and you'll get the story from the people who lived it — proud, unsentimental and well worth hearing.

However you feel about hunting, spend your tourist money in conservancy villages, hire local wildlife guides, and you're voting for the same outcome the program pursues: mountains where wildlife is worth more alive to the people who share them. That, in the end, is the whole story.