This is why leopards like to eat dogs.
Many cat-hating European dogs that had been imported to Africa met their end when they took off after the big spotted kitty.
A dog is nothing more than bigger, fatter, and more gullible black-backed jackal to a leopard. The fact that this unusual jackal would have been advancing upon the leopard at top speed merely would have helped the predator in its endeavor to get a canine snack.
Laurens van der Post wrote about leopard predation upon dogs in Southern Africa in A Story Like the Wind. Although his novel is fiction, it is based upon his real life experiences in the bush.
And that is why I find it very hard to believe that Afghans were ever used to close with a snow leopard. Bring to bay, maybe.
Snow leopards don’t even come down out the high mountains to be coursed.
One of the reasons why they are so hard to find is they stay where it’s vertical.
Last I read, the snow leopard isn’t closely related to the common leopard; it is actually a closer relative of the tiger.
Maybe the dogs guarded the goats from snow leopards….
I once read an account in one of the book adaptations to “Big Cat Diary” of a rottweiler being killed by a leopard without uttering a sound.
I can still directly quote it: “A reputation for fierceness means nothing to a leopard”
[...] take dogs that are walking beside armed men. Leopards, which are well-known for hunting jackals, were infamous for taking the naive Western dogs belonging to European settlers in southern Africa. Most European dogs had spent their lives chasing cats, and when they got to Africa and caught wind [...]