ANIMALS - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 85

There are many species in Chinese captive facilities for which reintroduction is the
stated rationale: they range from alligators and tigers to pandas and gazelles (and both
ungulates named for the explorer Przewalski). But unlike the few successful reintroduction
experiences elsewhere in the world, these programs generally focus on the animals rather
than the conservation issues. Saiga antelope are raised without a clear plan for where
they might live free-ranging within China. 23 Juvenile wild camels are snatched from the
wild to produce a captive population, but does anybody know how future descendents
of those raised in captivity will cope with their harsh desert environment? Red pandas
adapt readily to captivity and have become common in breeding facilities, but is anybody
studying whether there are places for them to live with appropriate habitat but no red
pandas? Recently, a single captive-bred giant panda was released into a nature reserve
(a supplementation rather than a reintroduction), but do we know whether the risk of
its transmitting disease to the existing pandas at its release site was justified by increas-
ing the existing population by one? In short, reintroductions using captive animals are
experiments, and the outcomes generally have little to do with the captive propagation
portion of the program. 24
I have little to say about captive breeding done for research and education. For spe-
cies such as giant pandas, Chinese efforts have clearly borne fruit for scientists. Chinese
zoos, admittedly not up to Western standards, continue to improve and provide valuable
education for city-dwellers. But to reiterate, contributions to in situ conservation from
this type of captive breeding are indirect, and thus necessarily modest.
Assessing the success of Chinese captive breeding done when in service of commerce
should be straightforward: calculate whether it is making a profit. If all such captive facili-
ties practiced transparent and standardized accounting and were free of hidden subsidies,
one could easily assess their economic success. Alas, neither precondition is met, so even
this conceptually simple assessment is cloudy. In any case, my categorization system
implies that these enterprises are assumed, a priori, to have no particular relationship
with conservation in the wild. 25
The type of captive rearing that elicits the strongest criticism from the West (and cor-
respondingly, the staunchest defense by most Chinese) is that which fits under my fourth
rationale, that is, meeting the demand for traditional consumptive use by using captive-
reared animals to lessen the incentive to kill free-ranging ones. Although this rationale
is quite logical, there is also a plausible argument that such captive breeding is wrong-
headed and counterproductive: by legitimizing the demand for traditional products, as
well as their legal trade, in the absence of a strong capacity to enforce the prohibition on
killing free-ranging animals, such programs may actually increase rather than decrease
poaching, doing more harm than good.
TWO CONTROVERSIES: MUSK DEER AND BEARS
Two animals merit being singled out for special attention: musk deer and bears (most
commonly Asiatic black bears). Musk deer are the objects of considerable attention in
China, particularly in captivity, as musk is among the most important traditional Chinese