Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
with their pack structure—meaning that all generally share the same meal—has made
them particularly susceptible to poisoning. The widespread application of poison deci-
mated wolves in North America; bullets had relatively little to do with it. And although
poisons have been used in China, they were never so widespread, or applied in such a
coordinated effort. When native prey is available, the low-powered guns of subsistence
pastoralists were never enough to more than dent the western Chinese wolf population.
Ironically, now that those guns have been confiscated, the wolf in western China might
be in more danger. With more livestock than ever roaming the land and yet less ability
among pastoralists to discourage wolves from seeing them as prey, frustrated pastoralists
might find that acquiring and using poison to reduce wolves could be an easier route to
riches than tolerating occasional livestock losses.
Dholes: In Trouble
One of the joys of visiting wild places, and occasionally observing rare wildlife, is coming
back to the civilized world to tell stories about what one has seen. Thus I was particularly
frustrated after returning from China in September 2003, where I had had the luck to
spend an entire day witnessing attempted predation on blue sheep by a pack of dholes. 132
Upon recounting my adventure, the response I always got, even from friends who were
wildlife biologists or otherwise heavily involved and knowledgeable about nature, was
not one of admiration or envy, but a shrug followed by, “What the heck is a dhole?”
Doubtless the least well-known large mammal species in all of China, the dhole, also
sometimes called the Indian or Asiatic wild dog, is one of the world's three species of
large-sized, pack-forming canid (the other two being the African hunting dog and, of
course, the wolf). By living in packs, these animals are able to subdue prey many times
their own size, and thus earn the enmity of local people (because such large animals often
include domestic livestock). In fact, there are few species that elicit more universal scorn
and condemnation from the average Chinese who bothers to have an impression than
the dhole, which although it causes very little actual damage (in part due to its rarity), is
never ascribed any of the more positive qualities occasionally attributed to tigers or other
dangerous predators, 133 but instead generally regarded as a kind of criminal of the animal
world—sneaky, untrustworthy, and unclean.
The dhole, the lone living species in the genus Cuon, has a geographic distribution that,
at least at one time, stretched from the island of Java in the south to Siberia in the north,
from as far west as Pakistan almost to the Pacific coast of Asia at the Ussuri River, which
separates Heilongjiang from the Sikhote Alin region of far eastern Russia. With such a
cosmopolitan distribution, one might infer that dholes are common and have learned how
to live successfully among humans, but from all accounts, this would be quite wrong.
Scientific research on the species has been limited to a handful of national parks in central
and southern India, where they seem reasonably common. Within China, dholes have
historically been reported from every province except Hainan, but almost all reports are
anecdotal, vague, and old. 134 In recent years, even sightings of dholes by livestock herd-
ers (who would have reason to know about them and voice their complaints) have been
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