SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 158

gered in Canada or Alaska, and since that time, wolves have increased their numbers in
the Great Lake states of Minnesota and Wisconsin, made a strong comeback in the Rocky
Mountain states of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming, and also increased their range and
numbers in Europe. Still, the words “wolf” and “endangered” remain linked in popular
culture, so it may be difficult to accept that, in western China, wolves rate as rather or-
dinary animals.
As the Tibetan pilgrims in Chapter 3 suggested, wolves are hardly loved in western
China; the phenomenon of honoring, to say nothing of adoring, wolves as representatives
of wilderness or of natural processes is distinctly Western. And although attacks on humans
are extremely rare, in China, unlike in North America, there is documentation of wolves
killing people within living memory. (It is not difficult to imagine periods in China's recent
past when human carcasses would have been available to scavenging wolves, a few of
which might then have learned to attack children.) More pertinent is the risk to livestock
from wolves: by all accounts, wolf predation on livestock constitutes only a modest ir-
ritant to pastoralists, most of whom view wolves as an inescapable, if unpleasant, fact of
life (though prior to their confiscation, the primary use of the small-caliber rifles owned
by most pastoralists was to shoot at, and occasionally kill, wolves). But because any loss
of livestock to wolves is a direct financial hit to the pastoralist, what is surprising is not
that attitudes toward wolves are negative but that they are not more so. As a top predator
that can only survive in densities orders of magnitude lower than their prey, wolves are,
of course, not abundant in an absolute sense (needless to add, reliable statistics on their
numbers are nonexistent). But judged according to the land's inherent ability to sustain
them, wolves in western China are reasonably common.
The question is why? In the livestock-growing regions of the western United States,
wolves had been essentially eliminated by about 1930 when human and livestock densities
were but a fraction of what they currently are in western China. 131 It might seem logical to
expect wolves to have met a similar fate in western China, yet they did not. Why not?
Once again, admitting that data are lacking with which we might address the ques-
tion rigorously, I offer a hypothesis for the difference that includes a minor reason and a
major one. The minor reason is that although most populations of wolves' wild ungulate
prey in western China are much smaller than in the past (some of the exceptions having
been noted above), they never experienced the catastrophic decline that befell bison,
elk, deer, and mountain sheep in the western United States during the nineteenth cen-
tury. The current, relatively happy state of affairs for most wild ungulates in the western
states should not blind us to the memory of the situation that existed near the turn of the
twentieth century, when these species had been reduced to remnants. Wolves in today's
American west are the beneficiaries of policies adopted a century ago to benefit people
(by prioritizing big game habitat and controlling hunting), but wolves in 1900 would have
had little but livestock to eat.
The major reason is poison: early in the twentieth century it was used routinely in the
United States, but its use for large predators remains rare in China. Notwithstanding their
size and strength, wolves are largely creatures of habit, resistant to change, and from the
perspective of somebody interested in killing them, relatively predictable. This, together