SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 120

consumptive use, or they conflict only minimally or locally with other economic uses of
the land. Tibetan gazelles, Tibetan wild ass, and blue sheep are of interest more because
of what we can learn from success (as well as because they sometimes are viewed as a
nuisance and their populations may need to be reduced) than because they are at any risk
of imminent extinction.
USED AND ABUSED: MUSK DEER
My years of work in China owe a large debt of gratitude to the humble musk deer. 2 This
is the first species I became interested in, and the development of my project studying
this little proto-deer provides, in many ways, a microcosm of wildlife conservation issues
in China in general. Although the species is not well known in the West (all musk deer
species are restricted to Asia), the animal is the source of the well-known musk, both
the word and the stuff, a secretion from a unique gland that has been used in traditional
medicine (and, until recently, as a base for fragrances) for thousands of years. 3 Musk is
mentioned in the Bible. There are other wild mammals that exude a musky odor, such
as muskrat and musk ox, but only the musk deer produces true musk. Only relatively
recently have synthetic chemicals replaced its use in the perfume industry (and such
replacement is not complete), and raw musk is still highly sought after for its purported
medicinal properties. To date, there are no acceptable substitutes for those who value its
medicinal use. But because only adult males produce musk, and even they produce only
a small quantity, the inexorable logic of supply and demand causes musk to be, on the
basis of weight, among the most expensive substances on earth. 4 It often sells, by weight,
for prices several times higher than gold.
The musk deer conservation issue encapsulates crucial themes that reappear consis-
tently throughout Chinese wildlife conservation: traditional consumptive use; initial lack
of any social and/or governmental institutions to regulate harvest of a public resource;
governmental overreaction in the form of a draconian prohibition on any killing (lacking,
needless to add, any realistic measures for its enforcement) that neither credited traditional
customs, nor allowed local people realistic alternatives to consumptive use, nor provided
incentives for them to defend their local resource from outsiders; and finally, official (if
tacit) abandoning the value that wild musk deer habitat might have by promoting poli-
cies that focus on meeting the unabated public demand for musk solely through using
animals raised in captivity.
In musk deer we encounter a species for which consumptive use had a long, distinguished,
and culturally embedded history, but for which social institutions to regulate that use never
evolved. Lacking any such regulation, human off-take rates were probably historically
limited—and musk deer populations thus avoided extirpation—primarily via the interac-
tion of low human population density and difficulties of accessing musk deer habitats.
As human populations and ease of access increased in the twentieth century, musk deer
populations became increasingly vulnerable, and as soon as organized efforts to consider
their status in China began, it was clear that they were in severe decline. 5 (China had begun
experiments with captive breeding of musk deer in the 1950s 6 ). But China took no action to