SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 153

theory. As large, strong, and hearty as they are, wild yaks—when it comes to confronting
humans—are basically wimps. 112
And that, it turns out, is part of their problem. Their fear and intolerance of people
generally constitutes the third leg of an unfortunate tripod of threats, each of which, on
its own, might be insufficient to explain the tremendous reduction in wild yak numbers
from prehistoric times to today. 113 The first leg, of course, is hunting for meat. Any beast
that provides a successful hunter with such a large and tasty reward of meat is inevitably
a prime target. Hunting wild yaks has a long history among the Tibetan pastoralists who
have shared their habitat, and although hunting has never been as common or valued among
Tibetans as other pastoralists, there clearly has been some hunting pressure from them on
wild yaks from time immemorial. 114 We also know that wild yaks were particularly targeted
for their meat during the nationwide famines associated with the Great Leap Forward
of 1959-61. 115 During the worst of the famine, recently completed railroads to Golmud
and Liuyuan acted as moving meat lockers, transporting the flesh of wild yaks eastward
toward millions of starving Chinese. Commercial poaching of wild yaks continued long
after the Great Leap, however, and no doubt contributed to population declines and range
reduction. Along with this, of course, low-level subsistence hunting by pastoralists no
doubt occurred, although most likely at intensities too low to explain large-scale popula-
tion reductions. Yaks reproduce slowly by the standards of wild ungulates, so can sustain
only low mortality rates before declining. 116
The tripod's second leg is hybridization with their domestic cousins. Genetic differences
between the two are insufficient to prevent fertile mating, but introduction into wild yak
populations of the anthropogenic architecture of the domestic yak genome would doom
them just as surely, if more gradually and insidiously, as would direct killing. The four or
so thousand years of selective breeding by pastoralists have produced a smaller and more
docile animal. But this very sidestepping of natural selection has produced an animal inca-
pable of coping with the natural environment on its own: domestic yaks need people just as
surely as the reverse. Additionally, domestic yaks are frequently hybridized with domestic
cattle, a husbandry practice designed for specific human benefits but having the effect of
moving the animal yet further from its wild roots. Domestic bulls are likely incapable of
moving freely into wild herds, but wild bulls are known, on occasion, to consort and breed
with domestic females. If bred females and the offspring resulting from such mating remain
with the domestic herd, the consequences befall the pastoralist and do not affect the wild
population. However, if domestic females are drawn away, kidnapped as it were into a wild
herd, both the pastoralist and the wild population are the losers. 117
Ultimately, however, wild yaks simply seem to vanish, searching for more remote
places, when human disturbance rises to some as yet undetermined threshold. This would
seem strange if one's view of the animal were that of strength, fearlessness, and aggres-
siveness. But here I return to the concepts that Jared Diamond elucidated in explaining
why some large mammals were successfully domesticated and others not. For if wild
yaks are not indeed as fearless and bellicose as sometimes believed, it is easier to imagine
them retreating in the face of humans.
The future of wild yaks is unclear. Certainly their low numbers and disjunct distribu-