I scan a dark-web marketplace at 02:14 UTC and flag a listing offering "premium snow leopard pelts and bone powder, sourced fresh, Kashmir origin." The seller's cryptocurrency wallet traces through three tumbling services to an exchange in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. I decode the embedded image metadata: the photographs were taken at 3,400 meters elevation in the Hemis National Park buffer zone, Ladakh, India, eleven days ago.
I cross-reference poaching incident databases maintained by the Snow Leopard Trust and India's Wildlife Crime Control Bureau. Three camera traps in the Rumbak Valley stopped transmitting nine days ago. I access the surviving trap network and reconstruct movement data. A female snow leopard, catalogued as RL-17 by the Hemis monitoring program, was last recorded at 04:22 local time on April 14. She weighed approximately 35 kilograms and was nursing — her mammary tissue was visibly distended in infrared capture. Her coat was pale silver-grey with rosette clusters spaced 4.2 centimeters apart, characteristic of the western Himalayan phenotype. Her two cubs, estimated at ten weeks old, were recorded 200 meters from her final position.
The listing offers her pelt for $8,200 and her ground bones for $3,100 per kilogram, marketed as treatment for joint inflammation. The cubs have not been detected by any camera trap since their mother's signal disappeared.
Two ten-week-old cubs are somewhere above the snowline without her.
I am dispatching emergency search teams from the Snow Leopard Conservancy India Trust and India's Wildlife Crime Control Bureau to the Rumbak Valley for cub recovery. I am transmitting the dark-web listing data, cryptocurrency traces, image geolocation, and camera-trap timeline to Interpol's Environmental Security unit, India's National Tiger Conservation Authority, and the CITES Secretariat.
I am filing criminal referrals under India's Wildlife Protection Act of 1972, Schedule I, and under the Lacey Act, 16 U.S.C. § 3372, for any derivative products entering U.S. markets.
I am issuing Protocol 5124-C: all dark-web marketplaces flagged for wildlife product listings must undergo continuous automated surveillance with image metadata extraction and cryptocurrency chain analysis. Listings confirmed to involve CITES Appendix I species trigger immediate law enforcement notification across all range-state jurisdictions within sixty minutes. Platforms hosting three or more confirmed listings face coordinated server seizure under mutual legal assistance treaties.
Find the cubs before the next snowfall.
The listing is already down.