SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 141

made by government agents in all the relevant countries. But with continuing demand
for an extremely high-priced product that could be easily hidden due to its small size
and light weight, the rewards to be gotten from the shahtoosh trade trumped the risk of
apprehension and punishment. With the principal occupation of most poachers being
small-scale agriculture (as with musk deer poachers, mostly in Gansu and eastern Qinghai,
particularly Hualong and Xunhua counties), and of those assisting (or ignoring) them
being pastoralism in an extremely harsh environment (in or near chiru habitat), incen-
tives to poach were continually strong. At prices of ¥200 to ¥500 per pelt to the poacher,
a poacher could expect to net ¥7,500 on a typical ten-day expedition—almost 100 U.S.
dollars per day at prevailing exchange rates—much higher than the daily wage for any
conceivable alternative use of that time. Poachers would typically pose as gold miners
(which was legal until the late 1990s, and which most already had experience with) and
employ scouts to determine the routes of government poaching patrols in advance so as
to more easily evade them. 66 Most apprehended poachers expressed ignorance that the
chiru was rare or protected. This naïveté might be difficult to believe given the ubiquity
of Chinese propaganda against poaching until one considers both the education level of
most poachers as well as the fact that even as they were becoming rare, a chiru herd,
once encountered, would typically number in the thousands, providing an impression of
abundance. Given the vastness of the chiru range, anti-smuggling efforts, valiant as they
were, could not possibly expect to cover the entire area. As the chiru population declined,
the product price no doubt increased accordingly. Thus, even as stepped-up enforcement
efforts elevated the risk of apprehension, the prospect of yet higher profits no doubt acted
to make the risk worth taking. (If it seems difficult to imagine how a species once so
abundant could be reduced so rapidly, one need only recall the archetypical example of a
recent historical extinction: the North American passenger pigeon, which was once among
the most abundant birds in existence, and was hunted to complete extinction by market
hunters prior to 1900; North American bison were also reduced to under a thousand in a
period of less than twenty years. 67 )
By the late 1990s, the chiru's plight had gotten the attention of both the international
wildlife community and Chinese authorities. An influential exposé of the shahtoosh trade
was published in 1997, and Chinese CITES authorities convened a high-profile workshop
on conserving the species in Xining in October of 1999. 68 Increased funds were chan-
neled into anti-poaching patrols, and staffing was upgraded at the huge nature reserves
that formed the backbone of chiru habitat (Qiangtang in Tibet, Kekexili in Qinghai, and
Arjin in Xinjiang). Coordination among reserves and provinces—a sore point in China
generally—was increased through meetings and purchasing better communication equip-
ment. 69 Surveys in Qinghai, Tibet, and Xinjiang were organized by the Chinese Academy
of Sciences, provincial wildlife offices, provincial environmental protection offices, and
funded by foreign-based wildlife conservation groups. (Needless to add, captive breed-
ing of chiru was also begun, the objective of which remained unclear.) The worldwide
wildlife trade monitoring network TRAFFIC began studying the illegal trade, and large
multinational NGOs such as the Wildlife Conservation Society and the International
Fund for Animal Welfare helped popularize the chiru's plight internationally, while indig-