A GROWING taste for the finer things among affluent Indians is posing a renewed threat to the Tibetan antelope (chiru), whose delicate fur is used to weave shahtoosh shawls.

The garments, which can fetch up to £10,000 each, are finding new markets in Bombay and other expanding urban communities where rising disposable incomes mean greater spending on luxury goods.

It is not just Europe and the US fuelling the demand for shahtooshes, the production of which is banned in India but continues in Kashmir. Clientele in India and South Asia are “very select”, according to the WWF, making the illegal trade harder to detect. In July three Indian traders were arrested during a police raid in Bangkok, where more than 250 “ring shawls” — woven from the fur of more than 1,000 dead chirus and each one fine enough to be drawn through a wedding ring — were seized.

The haul indicated that the shahtoosh trade was still thriving despite a four-year-old international ban on its sale and ownership. As many as 20,000 antelopes a year are killed on the Chang Tang plateau in Tibet, at an altitude of 15,000ft (4,500m), where highly organised gangs of spotters, skinners and marksmen armed with AK47s hunt.

Three to five animals are required to make one shawl. They cannot be shorn, like the goats that produce pashmina shawls, but must be slaughtered so that the fine underlayer — one fifth the width of human hair — can be plucked from the pelt.

Persistent poaching reduced the population from one million in 1900 to 50,000 in the late 1980s, although a recent survey in China found that the numbers had recovered to about 150,000 as a result of the inclusion of the species in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).

Some politicians in India, however, are undermining the case for their continued protection. Mehbooba Mufti, the president of the Jammu and Kashmir People’s Democratic Party and daughter of the chief minister, called last week for the production ban to be lifted. Abdul Hamid Punjabi, the Kashmir chamber of commerce and industries secretary-general, also described the ban as unjustified because artisan communities depend on shahtoosh spinning for their income.

“To see this sort of resistance is very disturbing,” John Sellar, enforcement officer at the CITES secretariat, told The Times. “This is a species that the world has agreed needs every effort to pull back from the brink of extinction.” Production and trade is banned under the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972. “Jammu and Kashmir has been manufacturing shahtoosh shawls for two decades, moving them out of the state, in many cases through Delhi. We hear all sorts of stories about how the wool has come from animals brushing up against barbed wire fences. This is complete nonsense,” Mr Sellar said.

Last month Nawang Rigzin Jora, the Jammu and Kashmir minister for power, said that the chiru would be extinct within four years if poaching continued.

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