Ida Auris Arango remembers the day in 2023 when she stumbled upon the Andean cat and its young on the mountainside. While shepherding her alpacas, she heard her dog barking and spotted the fog-gray feline cornered against a boulder, hackles raised and hissing as it shielded a pair of kittens. Grabbing the dog by the scruff of its neck, she gave the cats time to vanish among the queuña (Polylepis) trees. “It had a right to life. It was beautiful, and I was happy to see it,” she says of the fleeting encounter with the endangered wildcat species, one of the Andes’ most elusive mammals. For much of Ida’s life, Quechua locals treated the deaths of wildcats with ambivalence or even welcomed them. Attacks on livestock had been causing economic losses and driving a conflict that seemed to have no clear resolution. But attitudes toward felines have been rapidly changing in the village of Licapa in the Andes of central Peru. The changes are the work of a new conservation project led by Indigenous women. A project first created by Quechua conservation biologist Merinia Mendoza Almeida and wildcat expert Jim Sanderson, women in the community have made it their own. At first, they were bemused by the project. But the women slowly began to weave it into their lives and found it fun. It became a community space, one that was not led by men who typically dominate social affairs, nor the Peruvian government. It was a women’s project, a…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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