CHACCU: THE GOLDEN TREASURE OF THE INCAS

In Peruvian Andes, the vicuñas - small, elegant camelids with a soft golden fleece - used to roam in peace. It didn't take long for the Spanish 'conquistadors' to find out how precious that fleece was. Once it value was 'discovered', it led to a gradual killing that was bringing the vicuñas near to extinction.

By the mid-20th Century, vicuna overcoats were considered a luxury in the US and Europe. Animal's population plummeted to fewer than 10, 000, putting them on the path to extinction. It's believed that by the 60's, no more than 7000 animals were left in Peru.

In 1975, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species banned all international commerce of vicuna products. Still, poachers were undeterred, driven by the high prices on the black market – around $1, 000 a kilo. Enforcement of laws was nearly impossible: the vicuna habitat was far too vast and remote to patrol. The population continued to disappear.

Inca culture, however, had already created a solution for this issue.

Back in the Inca times, the vicunas' fleece was already valued. Its cloth was treated like gold and stored in imperial warehouses. Kings and leaders used to shear the animals in a technique called "Chaccu", which would happen annually.

Locals would go on horses through the mountains, corral the animals with stripes, moving in lines and pushing them towards a bottleneck to a place explicitly created to gather vicunas. The vicuña, once counted, were separated, shorn and released. Indiscriminate killing was forbidden.

Peru's government resurrected the tradition, in addition to declaring rural villagers who lived in the same mountains as the vicuñas their custodians, granting them the rights to shear and sell the fiber. Shorn Vicuna has no value to poachers, and the population started to rebound.

In 2008, vicunas downgraded to 'least concern' on the list of threatened species, becoming one of the few species that recovered from being endangered.