First, the image, and only what it allows us to say.
Screenshot: National Geographic Photo of the Day | Original page
A black cat, a herd of alpacas, and the icebound Andes behind them. The photograph was made in Cojata, in Peru's Puno region. Peruvian photographer Uriel Montúfar was working on a documentary project about high-altitude alpaca herders.
National Geographic's caption and accessibility description disagree about the cat's position: one says it is lying beside the alpacas, while the other says it is perched on a wooden post. The available material cannot settle the point, so we will not specify its posture. All we can say for certain is that a black cat is watching over alpacas on a plateau more than 4,000 meters above sea level.
What moved Montufar most, in his own words, was the scene's "unexpected harmony."
Unexpected matters. It tells us this was not an ordinary sight. The Chinese internet will soon produce claims that Andean herders have kept cats to guard livestock since ancient times. I searched in both English and Spanish, through academic, ethnographic and institutional sources, and found no evidence at all. There is no such tradition. There was simply a cat, there at that moment, and a photographer to see it.
The real door opened by the photograph, however, is the herd behind the cat.
Cojata: Where July's Average Low Is Nearly -10 C
Cojata lies in Huancane Province in the Puno region, against the Bolivian border and divided from it by the Suches River. It sits at about 4,350 meters, roughly 30 kilometers in a straight line from the northern shore of Lake Titicaca.
According to Peru's meteorological and hydrological service and its 1991-2020 climate normals, the annual average high is 12.6 C and the annual average low is -3.3 C. In July, the coldest month, the average low is -9.8 C. That is an average, not an extreme: it describes an ordinary July night.
Annual precipitation is 680 millimeters, 70% of it falling from December through March. There are no four seasons here, only a wet season and a dry one. September is the tail end of the dry season.
How do people live in such a place? With an animal that cannot be raised in many others.
How Many Alpacas Does Peru Have - and What Is Wrong with National Geographic's Claim?
National Geographic's caption says that Puno is one of seven Peruvian regions that together produce about 80% of the world's alpaca fiber.
The claim has probably confused two levels of geography.
Peru's 2012 national agricultural census counted about 3.686 million alpacas. Puno had 1.4599 million of them, or 39.6%. Add Cusco, Arequipa, Huancavelica, Ayacucho and Apurimac, and the top six regions already held 87.7% of Peru's alpacas. A seventh would bring the share to roughly 90%.
Estimates of Peru's share of the world total are irreconcilable. Peru's agriculture ministry has variously said 87% and "more than 80%." Figures from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization work out to only 60%. National Geographic's own alpaca encyclopedia page says there are only four million alpacas worldwide. The four figures cannot all be true.
Multiplying "about 90% of Peru" by "about 80% of the world" cannot produce 80%. Most likely, a claim that seven regions held 80% to 90% of Peru's alpacas was recast as 80% of the world's fiber.
The point on which every source agrees is this: the great majority of the world's alpacas live in Peru, and the largest concentration is in Puno.
Whose Descendant Is the Alpaca? Science Has Rewritten the Answer Three Times
This is the best thread in the story because it offers a ready-made lesson in how science changes its mind.
The first answer, accepted for many years: both alpacas and llamas were domesticated from guanacos; vicunas had never been domesticated.
The second answer, in 2001: a British-Peruvian team used mitochondrial and microsatellite markers in a systematic analysis and reached the opposite conclusion. Llamas descended from guanacos; alpacas descended from vicunas, domesticated roughly 6,000 to 7,000 years ago in the Peruvian Andes. The paper proposed changing the alpaca's scientific name to Vicugna pacos. That is why the name appears in every current reference book.
The same paper contained a grimmer figure: in the first century after the Spanish arrived, local people and native livestock declined by 80% to 90%.
The third answer, in 2020: whole-genome sequencing confirmed the 2001 conclusion and supplied a startling proportion. Some 36% of the alpaca genome came through introgression from llamas, while only 5% of the llama genome came from alpacas. The timing fell around the Spanish conquest. The paper's explanation was that conquest transformed agriculture, traditional herd separation collapsed, and the species began mixing.
In other words, one-third of the modern alpaca bears a genetic legacy of colonization.
A fourth answer, in 2025: the story turned again. A study published last October proposed that the alpaca was not simply "domesticated from the vicuna," but is a homoploid hybrid species. About 6,300 years ago, vicunas interbred with the ancestors of guanacos and llamas, creating the alpaca itself.
The corresponding author and principal institutions were in China: Sichuan University, Lanzhou University and the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. We will return to that connection.
Three Popular Claims About Alpaca Fiber Are Wrong
If you have bought alpaca clothing, you may have encountered three claims: alpaca fiber is hollow; it contains no lanolin; and it is naturally hypoallergenic.
A technical writer specializing in wool and rare fibers dismantled them one by one.
"Hollow." Not every alpaca fiber is hollow. Fibers finer than 20 microns are largely solid; only coarser fibers have medullae of varying size. That directly conflicts with the sales pitch that finer fiber is better. More awkwardly still, a Food and Agriculture Organization publication treats medullated fibers as a defect because they lower fleece quality.
"Lanolin-free." The author's verdict was that this was "completely wrong." Alpaca fiber contains 1% to 3% grease and another 0.5% to 1% suint.
"Naturally hypoallergenic." Whether a fiber pricks the skin depends on its diameter. Fibers above 30 microns begin to feel itchy, regardless of their grease content. The author's response was simple: show the hard evidence.
As for the claim that alpaca is warmer than wool, one study supports it; another laboratory test found little difference.
Another number also needs correction. The internet often says alpaca fiber comes in 22 or 52 natural colors. Neither figure has an official basis. The FAO's count is at least 23 shades.
The useful and delightful distinction is between breeds. Huacaya alpacas have short, crimped, dense and fluffy fleece, making the whole animal look like a teddy bear. Suri alpacas grow long, lustrous locks that hang like braids. Four out of five Peruvian alpacas are Huacayas. The next time you see one at a zoo, you can identify its breed on sight - and a 2023 measurement study supports the test. Average staple length was 68 millimeters in Huacayas and 118 millimeters in Suris, nearly twice as long.
The Finest Fiber on the Plateau Grows on a Wild Animal
The vicuna is one of the alpaca's wild ancestors. It is smaller, extremely fast and lives at still higher elevations. Its fiber measures just 11.9 to 14.7 microns in diameter, finer than the finest fiber from any domesticated animal.
So people nearly killed every last one.
In 1951, an American biologist carried out the first systematic vicuna survey and estimated that 250,000 remained in Peru.
Less than a decade later, the first national census counted 5,713. Of those, 4,987 were crowded into a single province in Ayacucho.
In under ten years, the population had fallen by 97.7%.
Then came a remarkable reversal. Peru's fifth national vicuna census, conducted by the National Forest and Wildlife Service in 2025, counted more than 300,000 across 16 departments. That is a 53-fold increase.
The recovery rests on a method called chaccu: vicunas are rounded up, shorn and released back into the mountains. The practice dates to the Inca era, when roundups were held twice a year. But many Chinese articles get one point wrong: the present system is not an untouched survival from antiquity. The ritual had faded as the animals disappeared. Modern chaccu was reintroduced in Peru in 1993, using nylon nets, electric clippers and a reconstructed community ceremony.
It is authentic, and it was remade. Both things can be true.
Where the Money Went Is Still Being Litigated
This story usually ends with "the vicuna was saved." It should not.
A 2010 paper in the International Journal of the Commons put a question mark in its title: vicuna conservation and poverty alleviation? Its conclusion was that conservation had been highly successful, but socioeconomic gains remained limited. Producers received less than 4.8% of the final retail price.
In March 2024, a US member of Congress wrote to a top luxury brand questioning the distribution of profits under its role as the sole buyer of vicuna fiber from Peru's Lucanas community. A sweater retailed for $9,000, while the community's fiber price had fallen by one-third over little more than a decade, from $400 per kilogram to $280 in its 2023 contract. The village's income from vicunas had fallen by 80%.
The accurate account of the recovery is therefore this: the animals came back; that is true. But the accounts have still not been settled. Conservation is not a victory achieved once. It is a negotiation that has not ended.
On the Other Side of the World, the Same Problem Has a Different Answer
Now turn to the Tibetan Plateau.
Another animal was hunted almost to extinction for a layer of extraordinarily fine down: the Tibetan antelope. Shawls woven from that fiber are called shahtoosh.
When the International Union for Conservation of Nature moved the Tibetan antelope from Endangered to Near Threatened in 2016, its news release contained the sentence that divides this whole story in two:
Because the fiber cannot be clipped or combed, the animals have to be killed.
It takes three to five skins to make one shawl.
The numbers are equally stark. The global population fell from about one million to roughly 65,000-72,500 between the 1980s and early 1990s. Strict protection later brought it back to between 100,000 and 150,000. According to a January 2026 article on the Chinese National Forestry and Grassland Administration's government website, the population within China has risen from fewer than 20,000 in the 1980s to about 300,000 today.
(These figures use different scopes - one is global, one covers China and another sometimes cited covers Kekexili alone - and must not be compared in the same sentence.)
Set the two paths side by side.
Vicuna fiber can be shorn while the animal walks away alive. That makes chaccu possible, along with a community industry and lawsuits over inequitable distribution.
Tibetan antelope fiber can be neither clipped nor combed. Only one path remains: strict bans on hunting, protected areas and no trade. China still lists the Tibetan antelope as a Class I nationally protected wild animal. Its international status was lowered; its protection level in China was not.
One animal can support a business. For the other, the market has to be closed completely. The paths could hardly be more different, yet both populations have returned.
That is what makes this worth telling children. Conservation is not completed by saying "do not hurt animals." It is a problem whose answer depends on particulars - in this case, whether the fiber can be taken while the animal is still alive.
The Cat in the Photograph, and a Cat Almost No One Has Seen
Finally, return to the black cat.
I could find no tradition of Andean herders keeping cats to guard livestock, so I will not invent one. There is a true story here, and it is better.
The same plateau is home to the Andean cat, Leopardus jacobita. The IUCN lists it as Endangered because fewer than 2,500 mature individuals survive worldwide. It lives as high as 5,180 meters in the Andes of Peru, Bolivia, northern Chile and northwestern Argentina.
It lives in Puno, too. In 2018, researchers placed camera traps in a farming community in the Cuyocuyo district of Sandia Province in northern Puno. After 1,275 camera-days, they obtained the first photograph of the cat there. Before then, Puno's only records were skins and droppings.
One photograph for 1,275 camera-days.
And in local tradition, this almost unseen wild cat holds a title. Researchers recorded that during ceremonies to mark alpacas and llamas, the Andean cat is called Awatiri Mallku: the supernatural herder of the animals.
The black house cat in the photograph watches over the alpacas. In the stories of this land, the true "guardian of livestock" is a cat that took more than a thousand camera-days to photograph once.
Sources
National Geographic Photo of the Day, September 14, 2026, "Andes Watchcat"; Peru's 2012 National Agricultural Census (CENAGRO); Andina, Peru's national news agency; the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's International Year of Camelids 2024 page and Natural Fibres from South American Camelids (2009); Kadwell et al., Proceedings of the Royal Society B 268:2575 (2001); Fan et al., Genome Biology 21:159 (2020); Wang et al., Molecular Ecology (2025), on the hybrid origin of alpacas; Qiu et al., Nature Communications 6:10283 (2015), on the yak genome; Science Advances (2023), archaeological evidence of domestic yaks on the Tibetan Plateau; Pinares et al., Frontiers in Animal Science 4:1167113 (2023); McGregor, RIRDC 12/150 (2012); Cameron Holt, "Alpaca Myths - Or Are They?"; Wakild, The American Historical Review 125(1):54 (2020); Lichtenstein, International Journal of the Commons 4(1):100 (2010); Peru's National Forest and Wildlife Service, fifth national vicuna census (2025); IUCN Red List update news release (2016); China's National Forestry and Grassland Administration, "The Ecological Legend of the Tibetan Antelope in Sanjiangyuan" (January 26, 2026); China's List of National Key Protected Wild Animals (2021); IUCN/SSC Cat Specialist Group entry on the Andean cat; Wildlife Conservation Society Peru and Revista Peruana de Biología on the Cuyocuyo camera-trap record; China News Service report on the Kekexili Tibetan antelope migration (May 8, 2026); Peru's meteorological and hydrological service, 1991-2020 climate normals; and Latina Republic's interview with Uriel Montúfar.