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stem the population's decline until the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law, at which time musk
deer were listed as a Category II species, which effectively ended any legal harvest of wild
animals. As I argued earlier, the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law is aspirational, providing
no enforcement system or funding to back up its lofty goals. There is no reason to believe
that killing musk deer (which officially became “poaching” with the Law's effective date in
1989) declined in response to the prohibition; it simply went from being an unrecognized
economic activity to an illegal one. By the 1980s, with increasing access to vehicles and
official approval for doing business in a free-market setting, musk deer hunting had become
primarily a specialty operation, conducted less by locals living in musk deer habitat than
by distant farmers, truck drivers, or merchants with time on their hands and profit on their
minds. And with the exception of a few nature reserves (and often, not even within them
until the late 1990s), no protection whatsoever was provided for the thickly vegetated and
usually (although not necessarily) forested habitats that musk deer require.
Musk deer all belong to the genus Moschus within the family Moschidae, and are thus
not really true deer at all, being only slightly more closely related to Cervidae, the main
family of deer, than to antelopes, sheep, or giraffes. 7 Their most obvious non-deer-like trait
is that adult males lack antlers, but instead sport long, saber-like tusks (elongated upper
canines) that protrude below the upper lips and are thus visible indications of maturity. 8
Musk deer are smaller than most true deer, only about a half-meter high at the shoulder,
and even a large male weighs in at a modest 17 kilograms (two musk deer that I captured in
Qinghai in 1990 both weighed about 10 kilograms). In common with most other ruminants
of this size, they are generally solitary and territorial rather than herd-forming. Associations
among individual musk deer, other than mother-fawn relationships and during mating,
are rare. They are selective feeders, choosing from the most nutritious part of whatever
plant species exists in any given area. 9 Although generally associated with forest cover,
musk deer do not appear to require trees; rather, they seek shelter, particularly when not
foraging, and this can be provided by a thick shrub canopy as well as by true forests. 10
They are lithe, agile, and sure-footed on almost any terrain, and often use steep cliffs (as
long as vegetation cover exists) on which to rest and avoid predators. They also use their
acute sense of smell and hearing to evade danger, and if approached, demonstrate their
fever-pitch temperament by furiously bounding away. These characteristics, together with
their crepuscular (i.e., early morning and late evening) feeding schedule give musk deer
a well-deserved reputation for being very difficult to observe in the wild. 11 Unfortunately
for them, however, they also tend to be creatures of habit, using well-worn trail systems
and defecating at fixed latrine sites, thus making it easy to determine where they live
(even if they can't be seen) and where to set snares for their capture. (These snares, even
if they don't kill the animal immediately, always result in the animal's death.)
It is this last characteristic that has made them so vulnerable to excessive mortality. It
doesn't take a great deal of field experience to learn where on any given mountainside
musk deer have recently been active, and thus even a person new to an area can quickly
optimize his chances for capturing and killing one. The relative ease of determining
locations for snares is magnified in the relatively open habitats used by musk deer on
the Tibetan Plateau (in comparison with those in Sichuan, Yunnan, or even in forested
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