ANIMALS - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 84

objective. In China, red deer, civets, and fur bearers such as raccoon dogs would fit under
this category.
That would seem to cover the gamut, but there is a fourth category with relevance to
China that explicitly bridges commercial and conservation rationales. I term this category
“meeting a commercial demand with the explicit objective of lowering (or eliminating)
exploitation pressure on the wild population.” Here, captive breeders need not engage in
any actions that explicitly help any wild populations. Rather, the concept is that the wild
population is helped to the degree the captive population thrives, optimally flooding the
market with cheaper, artificially bred products and thus reducing the incentive to kill
free-ranging individuals (or, if the cost of production cannot be reduced to below what
wild individuals will fetch, at the least providing a legal alternative to would-be buyers).
In China, this rationale is used for musk deer and Asiatic black bears, both of which are
used for medicinal purposes.
Notice that I have deliberately avoided treating the difficult issue of animal welfare
and suffering. On one hand, it should be self-evident that minimizing stress and pain to
captive animals serves as a basic tenet to any captive rearing program, animals in poor
condition being clearly counterproductive for attaining any of the possible objectives
listed. On the other hand, concepts of animal welfare lose their meaning when we turn our
attention back to the wild (which ultimately is our focus here), so any direct comparison
on these grounds between captive and free-ranging animals is fraught with peril. Who
can say whether a juvenile killed by a predator feels pain, or an ageing monarch whose
teeth have been ground to uselessness suffers when starving to death? Yet these or other
equally grim fates await every single animal born into the wild at some point.
Also missing entirely from my list of valid rationales for captive breeding of wild
species is the notion that they will be better off if taken care of by people. That's what
domestic species are for.
At first blush, it would seem that the first rationale, providing stock for reintroduction
or supplementation, would be by far the strongest from the perspective of in situ con-
servation. But reintroduction of extirpated species, it turns out, is never easy, and has a
checkered history even in places that can bring considerably more resources and expertise
to the problem than Chinese programs can normally muster. A recent literature review
suggested that only seven of 52 reintroduction attempts using animals born and raised in
captivity (13 percent) could be considered successful (success was more likely if using
free-ranging animals translocated from elsewhere). 21 Among the most crucial variables
identified in reviews of all translocations is that the cause for the species' initial demise
be identified and those problems rectified. The availability of high-quality habitat for
the new arrivals is also critical. 22 Thus, Western-trained conservationists approach any
casual suggestion of reestablishment of a wild population using captive animals with a
jaundiced eye: it is hardly something to be taken lightly. Even if it is the only alternative,
focus needs first to be placed on the prospective habitat to be repopulated and the reasons
for its inability to support a wild population. Usually, in comparison with the problems
of habitat loss or competition with man and livestock, producing the bodies to be poured
into the proposed area for reintroduction is the easier portion of the overall task.