SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 130

Its only refuge itself seemed to be succumbing to a similar pattern of increased human
encroachment and use, leaving less and less room for the gazelle. 39 Estimates of the num-
ber of surviving gazelles in the early 1990s were as low as 200. Further, there remained
concern (amid considerable uncertainty) that these gazelles were fragmented into three
or more subpopulations with no opportunity for demographic or genetic interchange. If
isolation was complete, the situation was indeed dire.
It now appears that either these earlier estimates were too low, that genetic interchange
may be occurring, or that there may have been some recovery since that time. Increased
survey efforts have suggested that, as of 2004, the total worldwide population of Przew-
alski's gazelle was at least 300, and may have been as high as 500. However, even if it
was this high, the species was in considerable danger of complete extinction: there were
none in zoos or other captive breeding facilities.
The confiscation of pastoralists' guns in the late 1990s may have had some beneficial
effect, as it became almost impossible to kill gazelles directly without firearms. But in the
mid-1990s, government-sponsored initiatives intent on reversing pasture degradation began
providing financial incentives for herders to fence individual pastures, and with the high
density of pastoralists around the lake, fences soon sprang up everywhere the eye could
see. Wire fences to control movements of domestic sheep might seem to be but a minor
inconvenience to wild species, but some wild ungulates are known to be unable—or simply
unwilling—to jump over or crawl under fences. A well-known case is that of the American
pronghorn antelope, which suffered dramatic declines in the Great Plains of the United
States and Canada during the nineteenth century, but has come back, partly because of
improvements in livestock fence design that allow occasional passage. 40 Such also seems to
be the case with the Przewalski's gazelle, which may have the strength to leap over fences,
but is burdened by an evolutionary history ignorant of such requirements. In recent years,
researchers have noted a number of gazelle mortalities adjacent to fences, where the animals
seemed unable to cross to alternative pasture or in order to avoid danger.
By the year 2001, the plight of the gazelle had finally caught the attention of officials
at the highest planning levels within the State Forestry Administration bureaucracy, and
when the new list of fifteen focal species was announced (sifted from among the existing
species under special State protection), the Przewalski's gazelle was among them. Modest
expansions of the area under whatever protection Qinghai Lake Nature Reserve could
afford were funded. Further good news for the gazelle came from the implementation of
the “retire cropland, restore grasslands” ( tuigeng huancao ) program (see Chapter 2) to
address the fact that so much grassland had been unwisely converted to cropland. But the
larger issues of livestock density and fencing remained unaddressed. Even if they were,
it seemed that the best conceivable future for Przewalski's gazelles had them occupying
but a tiny fraction of their original habitat.
VALUABLE, VALUED, BUT SENSITIVE: ARGALI
If there is a single species that wildlife advocates in western China care to highlight,
it would doubtless be the giant Asian wild sheep, the argali. The majestic sweep of the