SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 122

sections of Mongolia or Siberia). There are many places within the Qilian and Kunlun
Shan where one can stand on a high lookout point, view the surrounding scene, and point,
with reasonable confidence, to where the musk deer are.
Or, rather, where the musk deer were. Reliable numbers are lacking, but all indications
are that musk deer numbers have continued to plummet. 12 A declining musk deer popula-
tion is hardly news, but what appeared to be a continuing decline throughout the 1990s
suggested, for the first time, the possibility that musk deer will face complete extirpation
from large areas of their original range. 13 In earlier years, pastoralists had a long tradition
of hunting musk deer and either using musk in traditional medicine, or trading it to Chi-
nese, Arabs, Persians, or directly to Europeans. 14 It is likely that such historic use reduced
musk deer population densities generally, but also likely that harvest intensity would have
stopped short of that needed to extirpate populations when the costs of harvest increased
beyond the expected payoff. This economic calculus seemed to change in the 1970s and
1980s, when musk deer snaring became common among Hui and Salar agriculturalists
from Xunhua and Hualong counties in eastern Qinghai and Linxia County in Gansu. By
all accounts, small groups of these itinerant poachers would typically saturate an area
with wire snares and, given the relative ease with which musk deer travel routes could
be identified, kill most of the animals within reach in a short time. 15
A number of socioeconomic factors also conspired to make musk deer poaching a
rational decision for many agriculturalists during slack seasons, even those living as far
away as eastern Qinghai and adjacent Gansu. The market for domestically manufactured
products containing musk was no doubt large enough to create demand capable of soak-
ing up any available supply. 16 As of the early 1990s, musk deer pods could be sold for
¥800-1,000, 17 a windfall that may have surpassed the annual income of many agricultural-
ists at the time. The expenses involved in mounting a poaching expedition were relatively
low: if a vehicle could be commandeered (quite possibly an inexpensive and fuel-efficient
tractor), the main expenses were food and gasoline, both of which have always been
inexpensive in China (petroleum products in China have always been partly subsidized
and among the world's cheapest). Wire or even rope snares would have cost little, and
itinerant agriculturists could pitch a humble camp and live very simply. Considering that
any given expedition was likely to yield a number of mature, male musk deer, it is likely
that income from such poaching far exceeded the costs involved.
Because the only economically valuable part of the animal was the musk pod itself (mea-
suring only 4 to 5 centimeters in diameter), smuggling the product out of the mountains
back to towns and cities for sale would have been easy; any guard stations along the way,
even if operational, were designed solely to check for illegal timber felling, not for wildlife
poaching. The risk of being apprehended by law enforcement personnel in transit was thus
negligible, and no doubt even lower once having returned to commercial centers. 18 Because
these poachers were mobile and nonresident, they had no incentive to promote sustainability
of the musk deer population in any given locality: if musk deer were reduced to levels low
enough to make continued snaring efforts unprofitable, poachers could simply move to
another area. When musk deer in all areas known to any given group were extirpated, these
agriculturalists could easily move on to different items of trade, or simply return home. And,