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(Nyahongo et al. 2005; Holman, Muya, and Røskaft 2007). Surveys by Ndibalema
and Songorwa (2008) indicated that eland and topi are the preferred species of these
illegal hunts, but their relative rarity means that buffaloes and wildebeests are killed
most often. In some villages adjacent to the park the annual consumption of wild
meat was as much as 36 kg per capita, almost as much as Japan's recent per capita
meat consumption (Smil and Kobayashi 2012), which is explained by the low cost
(with wild meat selling for only about a quarter the price of commercially marketed
meat). Fa and Brown (2009) summarized the recent evidence of hunting in Africa's
tropical moist forests and coni rmed that ungulates and rodents make up most of
the consumed zoomass, and that both these classes of mammals are subject to
unprecedented rates of killing, but because in most cases even the basic understand-
ing of their ecology is missing, it is impossible to formulate any sensible hunting
quotas.
African hunting has received by far the greatest amount of international attention
because of the killing of primates (and their orphaned juveniles) in the central and
western part of the continent and because of continuing illegal hunting of elephants
and rhinos. But I have argued that it is the proverbial omnivory of 1.3 billion
Chinese and the prestige bestowed by that ancient culture on exotic dishes and
medicines that is the single most important food-related threat to the diversity of
zoomass in Asia and beyond. On the one hand, China's remarkable omnivory is a
very efi cient way of food consumption, as hardly anything gets wasted: pig's
skin and chicken feet, silk moth pupae and carp eyes are all eaten; on the other
hand, indiscriminate eating means that everything that moves (from snakes to
dogs, monkeys to owls) and much that does not (abalones, sea cucumbers) gets
consumed.
This was not much of a problem during the decades of Maoist impoverishment,
but since the 1980s China's rising incomes have created a rapidly expanding demand
for wild meat and other supposed delicacies, which are often featured during ban-
quets given by the country's nouveaux riches or by its famously corrupt ofi cials.
The extent of these activities was indicated by a rare Chinese estimate that put a
highly conservative annual value spent on eating, drinking, and traveling at public
expense at more than 100 billion yuan in 1992 (Wu 1996). By 2010 China's average
household consumption expenditure had quadrupled compared to the 1992 level
(NBSC 2010), an increase that makes it is easy to imagine how much worse these
biosphere-depleting excesses have become.
Some of China's food choices condemned in the West are merely a matter of
cultural conditioning; there is surely no rational argument why killing young lambs
