At the end of January, ExplorersWeb — along with dozens of international media outlets — reported about the woman skier in Xinjiang, China, who was attacked by a snow leopard when she tried to get too close for a selfie.
The story was highly unusual, because snow leopards — unlike cougars, tigers, and leopards — don’t attack people, even occasionally. Nevertheless, the incident did occur. The woman was injured and bleeding profusely, but survived. Her helmet and ski clothing likely protected her until bystanders chased the big cat off her.
The following video shows the aftermath, with others helping the woman while the snow leopard — seemingly not panicked by all the hubbub — wanders off through the deep snow.
A couple of days later, a dramatic photo appeared on Reddit and quickly went viral. It purportedly showed the selfie that the woman had taken just before the attack, the big cat just behind her. It was a tempting follow-up story, but someone wondered: Is this real, or is this AI or Photoshop? Our company’s social media specialist ran it through three AI detectors, which came back with only a 3% chance that it was AI.
Nevertheless, once the question was raised, the photo underwent more scrutiny. Our parent company, AllGear Digital, owns several outdoor-related sites, including GearJunkie, BikeRumor, and The Inertia, and this follow-up was of potential interest to a few of us. One of the other editors pointed out that her helmet — which had a Giro logo in the video — lacked that logo in the supposed selfie.
The supposed selfie, left, and a screenshot from the video, right.
Red flags
Another red flag is the snow leopard’s relaxed posture. This did not look like an animal about to attack. It had the mellow body language of a game farm or zoo captive.
If you enlarge the selfie even further, the proportions are all wrong. The cat looks far too big to have been taken with a camera phone’s extreme wide-angle lens, no matter how close it is. 
In the end, we decided the selfie was fake, probably Photoshopped, and that seems to have been the consensus among wildlife experts. The popular wildlife podcast Tooth & Claw did a nice analysis of the incident this week.
Unfortunately, not all media outlets caught the deception:
As anyone who has watched reels on social media knows, it’s getting harder to believe your eyes, even with video.
As the Tooth & Claw folks pointed out, the snow leopard was caught a few days later, when it broke into a sheep pen. It was a young male that had been hanging around in the district before the attack and was evidently habituated to people.
Authorities will keep it till spring, then release it elsewhere.
