SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 138

tions of governmental authority and the role of consumptive use in conserving wildlife.
Over the next eighteen months, scientists were interviewed, senators and congressmen
sent angry letters to agency officials, lawyers went to work dismantling their opponents'
legal points, embarrassed public relations officers provided tepid explanations and bland
assurances, and accusations of bad faith were volleyed between and among players in
the case. In the end, the USFWS settled the case without trial, returned the trophies to
the hunters, and decided to revisit its approach to permitting imports of argali under its
own law, the U.S. Endangered Species Act (ESA), rather than relying on the subspecific
distinction contained in CITES.
This resulted in new regulations on the entire species, published on June 23, 1992,
which classified argali as endangered under the ESA except in the countries of Mongolia,
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, where it was classified as threatened. 58 By policy (although
not by law), the USFWS only considered application for permits to import threatened
species, not endangered species. Thus, by classifying all Chinese argali as endangered,
this new policy effectively prohibited Americans from importing argali trophies from
China, and thus dealt a substantial blow to the expansion potential of the newly established
international hunting areas.
The elimination of Americans from legal participation in trophy hunting for argali
angered Chinese officials, who saw it as unjustified interference in their domestic man-
agement of wildlife. Most Chinese officials had little idea of the complexity and minutiae
of U.S. regulatory law that surrounded the policy change, some seeing the return of the
contested Gansu trophies to the hunters as simple vindication of the original Chinese
taxonomic position. In contrast, some American groups opposed to trophy hunting gen-
erally, found the new regulations insufficiently strict and American monitoring of argali
hunting in the three countries where permitting continued insufficiently detailed.
Thus did Chinese argali hunting begin amid a whirlwind of controversy, and develop
largely (albeit not entirely) without funds from American hunters. But develop it did, and
by the late 1990s hunting areas featuring argali (as well as the more abundant and less
controversial blue sheep, Tibetan gazelle, and Asiatic ibex) commandeered a dispropor-
tionate amount of attention from provincial leaders in Xinjiang, Gansu, and Qinghai. As
discussed further in Chapter 8, these hunting areas have generally succeeded in recruiting
and retaining energetic and dedicated staff, and raising awareness of wildlife conservation
in their communities, but have not yet begun truly managing and conserving argali.
Argali on the Tibetan Plateau have persisted despite the presence of mankind and his
livestock for centuries, so it seems simplistic to conclude that coexistence is impossible.
Because we cannot recreate the past, we have no way to detail the ways in which argali
earlier met their needs and maintained their population levels in the face of traditional
pastoralism and subsistence hunting. More research is obviously needed, particularly on
their habitat use and movements and their response to human disturbance, but plateau argali
are fiendishly difficult to study (in part because of that very mobility). As well, patterns of
pastoralism and development are in a state of rapid change on the Tibetan Plateau; human
influences on argali may be very different in ten years from what we see today.
That said, it appears that increasingly intensive livestock grazing—typically in areas