ANIMALS - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 78

a domestic one. The distinction has little to do with taxonomy; many domestic animals
can breed successfully with their wild ancestors under the right conditions (hybridiza-
tion of wild populations by domestic cousins is often a conservation concern). Rather,
the distinction arises from the place of mankind in shaping these animals. Although the
boundaries are a bit fuzzier, most such citizens can also easily distinguish an individual
animal they would term wild from one they'd term captive. Here, there is essentially
no biological difference at all, the categorization being entirely the degree of human
control. These distinctions become formalized when we move from public perception
to public policy. We entrust management of wildlife to wildlife management agencies,
management of domestic animals to individual farmers and ranchers (with oversight and
regulation by departments of livestock or agriculture), management of pets to individual
owners (with oversight by municipal animal control agencies), and management of captive
specimens of species we consider fundamentally wild to zoological parks. These same
categories exist in China of course, but curiously—given the otherwise strong tendency
in Chinese culture to pigeonhole everything—their boundaries are considerably blurrier
and more porous than they are in the West. The weakness of the boundary delineating
animals that we in the West would consider wild owes much to the underlying Chinese
conception, felt if rarely expressed overtly, that these animals too would be better off if
cared for by people.
That Westerners easily conceive of free-ranging and captive animals as different is
exemplified by two separate citizen initiatives recently approved in the U.S. state of
Montana. A primarily rural state, Montana has among the highest rates of participation in
big-game hunting, and no species is of greater interest to hunters than the American elk
(also called wapiti). Although outdistanced by white-tailed deer in numbers killed, their
size, majestic antlers, quality of meat—but perhaps most of all, their association with
unspoiled, uncivilized places—have made elk virtually synonymous with the concept of
recreational hunting in Montana. So central is hunting to a cultural ideal most Montan-
ans hold dear, that in 2004 they overwhelmingly approved a citizen initiative adding to
the state's constitution wording that “the opportunity to harvest wild fish and wild game
animals is a heritage that shall forever be preserved to the individual. . . .” 5 It was largely
a symbolic move, a political statement aimed at anti-hunting groups in an effort to impede
any future attempts to ban or severely restrict hunting. It in no way prohibited the state
wildlife agency from managing hunting (even to the point of closing seasons entirely if
necessary) and it produced no concrete change in either state law or day-to-day wildlife
management. But in approving this amendment, voters clearly were emphasizing the
value they placed on hunting, among other species, wild elk.
What is instructive is that just four years earlier, this same electorate had approved with
a similar majority a citizen initiative that phased out the practice of raising and hunting
elk in captivity. 6 “Elk farms” had begun proliferating in Montana's wide-open spaces,
in part because traditional forms of agriculture (using domestic species of plants and
animals) had become so economically challenging. Opponents of elk farms argued that
captive elk might escape despite their keepers' best efforts to fence them in, and thereby
pose the risk of disease and hybridization to Montana's wild elk. They also argued that