Wild Dogs Imperiling Himalayan Wildlife
To be published spring 2025 with The New York Times
I did not want to get eaten by dogs.
But in the sky bound peaks of the Indian Himalaya, that is sometimes the ending.
It was the summer of 2024. I was making the flight from Delhi to Leh for the third time in two years. By air, the Union Territory of Ladakh’s seat is barely over an hour away from India’s capital. The stories of months’ caravans through sweltering jungles and snow sealed cols are lost now, passed by sleeping airplane passengers with window shades pulled. But heading to Ladakh, I always open mine.
Today, only the Himalaya’s ice bayonet tips thrust through the sheet of shinning clouds. Vapor meets glacier, and their fateful union under this sun at 30,000 feet is a violent white. Watching this, inside the dark innards of a plane, my eyes burn with sparks. I bring a hand to my face, the crack between two fingers becomes the window now, and I squint cautiously, the tips of my eyelashes tickling a vignette against my hand. But in this brilliant convergence, save for the most prominent of pyramids, it becomes impossible to tell cloud from peak. All are one under heaven. All are a blanket chorus of white angles glittering under the sun.
Here, in heaven, I remember that a few years prior a young woman, dwelling somewhere below, left her home at dawn, was met by a pack of dogs, and never returned. Just this last December, in Spiti, where I had spent March, a three-year old boy was playing in the mud courtyard of his village home when a feral dog entered. The boy died in the hospital.
But the feral dogs’ impact on animal lives, though seemingly less connected to us, has been greater. An unquantifiable number of palas cat, ibex, pika, blue sheep, red fox, kiang, black-necked crane, and snow leopard have been lost to the jaws of dogs. Some of these are endangered species. It is a pan-Himalayan crisis: China faces the same threat too.
I came to India try to find these dogs. I came to photograph their cataclysmic predation on the already threatened wildlife of the plateau, arguing on grant applications that my photographs, if seen at the highest levels, could push the Indian government to act. You can read more of the story in the New York Times and Homeward Angel, here and here.
