The collar does seem bulky—does it hinder the cat at all?
That is something we very carefully consider, and it is why it was a decade between our last large collaring project in Mongolia and our next in Pakistan. We were waiting for GPS-satellite collars to be reduced in size to where it would be appropriate for a snow leopard. There is a general rule of thumb that collars should not exceed 3% of the animal’s body weight. Our collars are about 1.56 lbs, so by that rule we could collar a 59 lb cat with thatThe cat in the film weighed 75 lbs, so the collar was only about 2.08% of her weight. Personally, I am much more concerned about the bulk of the collar than the weight. If it interferes with her being able to make a kill, then it doesn’t matter if it is 1%, 3%, or 5% of her weight! To estimate what a cat in the wild might react like, we tested these collars on a captive snow leopard in the Woodland Park Zoo here in Seattle. Before we placed the collar on the zoo cat, we had volunteers take behavioral observations every 20 seconds for 6 hours
