People have tried all kinds of strategies stem the trade in illegal animal parts. Often these involved high-profile crackdowns, such as arresting smuggler or torching piles of contraband elephant tusks.
But in southern Africa, wildlife advocates are celebrating success with a different, more friendly strategy. They are persuading communities to swap real leopard skins for synthetic versions for ceremonial uses. In one part of Zambia, the campaign appears to be bearing fruit, with leopard populations rebounding in the country’s Kafue National Park and surrounding land, scientists reported last week in Conservation Biology.
“The study demonstrates that innovative conservation interventions which aim to address causal drivers of wildlife declines can be effective and cost-efficient,” conservation researcher and lead author Aditya Malgaonkar wrote in an email to Anthropocene.
Malgaonkar is a scientist at Panthera, a U.S.-based conservation group focused on saving wild cats such as lions, tigers and leopards. That organization is behind the Zambia initiative, dubbed “Furs for Life Zambia.”
The campaign was inspired by declining numbers of leopards in western Zambia, and links to use of the animal’s pelt in an annual event by the Lozi people that marks the flood season. During one ceremony, called the Kuomboke, 200 paddlers adorned with skirts made primarily of leopard skins ferry the king of the Lozis, the Litunga, on a barge. Around 1000 people compete to become one of those select paddlers, creating demand for an estimated 150 to 250 fur garments each year.
Demand for these furs is thought to be a prime driver of leopard poaching in the nearby national park and surrounding wildlands.
Instead of resorting just to threats of a poaching crackdown, Panthera and collaborators worked to find a way to help the ceremony to continue with the full regalia, while also sparing the leopards. After extensive consultations and tests of synthetic furs designed to resemble the real thing, they found what appeared to be the solution. In 2019 the Litunga issued a royal decree that only synthetic furs could be worn in official Lozi ceremonies. Panthera, meanwhile, promised to supply paddlers with all the fake furs they needed.
“Our approach targeted users who were motivated by the prestige of participating in Kuomboka and symbolic value of leopard fur garment but were also aware of the declining leopard populations and concerned about not being able to continue their traditions,” Malgaonkar wrote.
The “carrot” of high-quality synthetic furs was paired with the “stick” of more strict enforcement of poaching laws in the area.
But was the strategy really working? While such substitutions have been tried before, the evidence of their success was thin. In Zambia, the researchers, many of them working for Panthera, wanted to see how well they could quantify the response.
The result, the researchers found, was a dramatic shift both in the use of leopard skins and in the cat numbers. By 2021, surveys showed that 95% of paddlers approved of the synthetic furs, and by 2024 just 10% of the royal paddlers wore real leopard furs, a 74% drop in two years.
The shift to artificial furs could save between 204 and 1310 adult leopards in the region over a decade, at a cost of between $3,395 and $528 per saved cat.
Scientists have already seen evidence of a rebound in the leopard population, based on estimates calculated from sightings motion-sensitive cameras. The results suggest “that carnivore populations can also quickly recover if threats are effectively mitigated,” Malgaonkar wrote.
The success came from a constellation of different forces, according to interviews with Lozi community members, conservation group staffers and national park officials. The Furs for Life campaign and the crackdown on trafficking both helped make the artificial furs more attractive than poaching, the survey revealed.
The project offers a model that could be tailored to meet other situations where poaching is driven partly by demand for the use of wildlife in cultural traditions, whether its public ceremonies, medical treatments or personal prestige, said Malgaonkar.
Panthera has already mounted a similar campaign with a church in South Africa and is now working to replicate the Zambia work with the Ngoni people in eastern Zambia. Last year, Panthera formed a partnership with the Ngoni Royal Establishment there, where leopard skins are a prominent ceremonial feature.
At the 2025 Ncwala, an annual Ngoni event marking the beginning of the harvest season and thematically centered around the leopard, ceremony chairman Dumasini Tembo declared that “our partnership with Panthera through Furs for Life will save big cats from our spears, allowing us to celebrate and protect these animals while sustainably continuing our celebrations for generations to come.”
Malgaonkar, et. al. “Evaluating synthetic substitutes to reduce illegal harvesting and support species recovery.” Conservation Biology. March 24, 2026.
