ANIMALS - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 77

and one of the fellows picking it up. The program then related, in rather hagiographic
terms, the story of a rural family who lived on the edge of a wetland containing some of
the few remaining alligators. So imbued with the spirit of wildlife conservation was this
family that they had informally adopted this young alligator, going so far as to give it a
name. The program showed the family cooking themselves a meal, then marching hap-
pily down to the waterside whereupon they called out the alligator's name and it dutifully
swam over to them, gingerly stepped up to the food offering, devoured it, and then shyly
retreated back into the river. 1
Finally, the narrator acknowledged that most important for wildlife was protection
of the environment. There then followed additional interviews with scientists, all of
whom emphasized a message any Western-based conservationist would find familiar and
comfortable, namely, the protection of natural habitat for wildlife, 2 frequently invoking
the general Chinese term for nature, da ziran. The finale showed what appeared to be a
reintroduction or translocation of some birds in a forested environment. To the accom-
paniment of soaring orchestral strings, the program showed repeated images of a couple
of fellows reaching into a cage, cradling a bird in their hands, and then—the imagery
shifting to dramatic superslow motion—throwing the bird up into the air at which point
it took flight. This was presumably the pinnacle: mankind helping to put wildlife back
into the wild.
In roughly forty-five minutes of airtime, the program had not shown a single image of
a wild animal in a context not inextricably linked with—indeed, dependent on—human
beings. First, the viewer was shown pandas 3 in a captive facility, an environment entirely
controlled by humans. When the topic turned to in situ conservation, images were entirely
of people handling and feeding an individual animal. Finally, as if in a logical progres-
sion, the program purported to show the release of animals into the wild, thus elevating
wildness to the highest state. But even here, the animals in question regained their wild
state only by being plucked from cages (where, presumably, they had lived until then),
freed from the captivity of evil, imprisoning humans by virtuous, rescuing humans.
Consistently, the images were not only of humans as friends to wild animals, but also as
nurturers, protectors, and mentors to wild animals.
The images from the TV program, together with the word “protect” ( baohu ) drummed
at every turn into the viewer's consciousness like a religious mantra, worked together to
produce a most ironic result. 4 Rather than protection implying, as I think most Westerners
would assume, the provision of safety from the overconsumptive impulses of mankind,
protection in this sense has come to imply safety from the rigors of nature itself. As
portrayed in popular Chinese culture (and, I fear, increasingly accepted in government
policies), the meaning of protecting wildlife, rather than meaning protecting animals in
the wild, has come perilously close to meaning protecting animals from the wild.
DISTINCTIONS: CLEAR AND BLURRY
Even if they rarely have reason for giving it much thought, most people raised in Western
cultures have little difficulty conceptualizing the difference between a wild animal and