SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 149

clear that pest activity basically occurs on degraded grasslands. Because degraded
grasslands provide appropriate habitats for a number of rodent species, their numbers
can increase; it is this increase that then exacerbates grassland degradation. 99
But if contemporary Chinese biologists appear to have produced objective, comprehen-
sive, and relatively rigorous work laying out the possible compromises between the high
biological value of pikas and zokors and the economic and management implications of
their present abundance, Chinese government policy appears to be stuck some decades
behind them. 100 While some documents have begun to mention the merits of “biological
control” or “integrated management,” decision makers still seem mainly interested in
poisoning pikas and trapping zokors. 101 and local officials routinely refer to pikas and
zokors as “destroying” ( pohuai ) rangelands. 102 If arguments that zokors may ultimately
enhance soil productivity, or that pikas act as keystone species, fail to persuade where
livestock is clearly the priority, it remains surprising that even in nature reserves, dedicated
as they nominally are to maintenance of biodiversity, “rodents” are considered vermin and
large-scale plans exist to severely reduce their numbers. 103 It is this discrepancy between
the viewpoints of Chinese scientists and policymakers that will be worth watching for
signs of change in the next few decades.
WILD PROGENITORS, DOMESTIC REPLACEMENTS
In his classic 1997 work Guns, Germs, and Steel , Jared Diamond invoked what he called
the “Anna Karenina principle” in explaining why, throughout mankind's long history and
out of all the possible wild animals in the world, only fourteen species of large mam-
mal had been successfully domesticated. Borrowing from Tolstoy's observation that any
number of factors might lead to the unhappiness of families but that only when all things
aligned might a family be truly happy, Diamond observed that, likewise, in attempting
to domesticate wildlife there exist myriad reasons for failure, whereas success requires
the convergence of a number of different happy coincidences. For many of the earli-
est domesticated species (largely originating in the Fertile Crescent, today's Iraq and
Iran), the identity of wild forebears remains unclear; for others, it is clear that their wild
progenitors are extinct. Thus it is noteworthy, particularly given China's otherwise poor
history of maintaining large mammals in the wild, that of Diamond's fourteen species of
domesticated large mammals, wild ancestors to two of them still exist in western China.
These are the wild yak and the wild camel, both of which are still found in the wild. 104
Of course in both cases, the domestic descendents vastly outnumber the wild ancestors.
But the wild species are hanging on, if only by a fragile and tenuous thread.
Wild Yaks: Ferocious Cowards
Most of us can remember, as children, having large, colorful books introducing the Eng-
lish alphabet displaying an animal for each letter. And because there are so few animals
whose names begin with “Y,” nearly everybody knows what a yak is. But surprisingly few