ANIMALS - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 88

recovery. 37 But the analogy between North American fur bearers and these Chinese spe-
cies is too poor to allow any conclusion, and for a very important reason: unlike in China,
wild harvest of these North American fur bearers continued even as commercial farms
became established, and habitat for such species as red fox and mink never became rare.
Trapping in the wild was not historically banned, but rather controlled and monitored.
There is thus too much dissimilarity to conclude that it was captive propagation of fur
bearers that enabled the recovery of wild populations.
An additional candidate species to consider for insight into this issue is the South
American nutria, another fur-bearing species that had become almost extinct due to ex-
cessive exploitation but later recovered. Captive breeding of nutrias began in the 1920s
(primarily in Europe) and, most recently, was estimated to account for about half of the
over 6 million pelts traded annually. Did captive breeding save nutrias? Perhaps, but again
there are impediments to extrapolating any general principle to support current Chinese
policy from the nutria story. First, nutrias, being rodents, breed far more prolifically
than either musk deer or bears, and are biologically capable of a rapid response to any
protection. Second, they were not only bred in captivity, but they were also introduced
into the wild in many areas to which they were not native (or they escaped from captive
facilities to become feral populations on their own initiative). Nutrias are now so numer-
ous in many southeastern states in the United States that they qualify not merely as an
economic resource but also as a pest. In Argentina, nutria populations have rebounded
(although, this being their native habitat, they are not nearly so damaging to agriculture
there, instead inhabiting mesic and semi-aquatic grasslands with little damage to crops),
but they are still subject to commercial trapping in the wild. 38
The short answer is that we do not know if captive breeding will help or hurt wild
populations, and have precious little history to guide us. The Chinese strategy of com-
pletely prohibiting wild harvest while continuing to advance commercial use of products
from these species via captive breeding is an unprecedented experiment. In recent years,
there have been anecdotal reports that both brown bears in China's west and Asiatic black
bears throughout China have increased (based primarily on the increased incidence of
conflicts with humans). But firearms have also been confiscated from those who ear-
lier had them, and educational campaigns publicizing the illegality of killing protected
species (including bears) have continued, so any increase in wild populations could be
unrelated to the availability of gall from captive bears. It has not yet been convincingly
established that the allure of profiting from selling bear gall is the prime motivation for
Chinese who kill bears. Meanwhile, musk deer appear to be continuing their range-wide
population decline.
Faced with these tantalizing but ultimately unsatisfactory tidbits of data, I would assert
that neither camp in the “breeding-them-saves-them” vs. “breeding-them-kills-more-of-
them” debate can claim the support of empirical evidence. Rather, the most parsimonious
interpretation of existing information is that captive breeding of a commercially used
species has no predictable effect whatsoever on the health of the parallel wild popula-
tion. We cannot conclude that rearing more of a species in captivity either helps or harms
those in the wild. Rather, the status of free-ranging wildlife will be determined primarily