SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 160

exceedingly rare. 135 Conceivably, dholes could be confused by local respondents with
the far more common wolf, and if so, the presence of dholes might be underreported.
But this seems unlikely: although both are pack-living canids, they are physically quite
distinct and not easily confused. Dholes have deep red pelage (except for their contrasting
white chest), while wolves, although physically more diverse, never have these striking
characteristics. Dholes usually travel in packs, which makes them more conspicuous than
solitary hunters, and they have loud and unique vocalizations (another common name
for them is the whistling dog) that would allow their detection even at night or from a
distance. In the one place where I know dholes existed as of 2003 (the Kharteng hunting
area), local pastoralists and wildlife staff reported their presence to me and could accu-
rately differentiate them from wolves. 136 Thus it is difficult to escape the conclusion that
the dearth of anecdotal reports elsewhere reflects true rarity. Dholes appear to be literally
on their last legs throughout China (no less so in the remote sections of western China),
their reputation as livestock killers perhaps having already spelled their doom.
But if the tiger has vanished from western China in a fashion biologists have come
to understand, becoming restricted to specific habitats and thus helpless when those
habitats were transformed and inhabited by humans, the dhole faces almost the reverse
problem. It is seemingly everywhere yet nowhere, distributed so widely that its geo-
graphic range has become only a superficial veneer, painted, as it were, onto the fabric
of the landscape. Dholes are so rare that their ultimate extirpation from China—should
it someday come to that—will be not because they contracted to a point of land that
became infinitesimally small, but because their spatial diffusion became so shallow that
they simply evaporated.
Brown Bears: Holding On
If wolves are disliked, bears are genuinely feared. The broad valleys and gentle slopes
of most western Chinese mountain ranges provide little sense of security to a man on
foot faced with a brown bear (essentially, a North American grizzly). Like wolves, bears
constitute a risk to pastoralists' income (most bears have a weakness for mutton), but they
also occasionally tear up encampments and their sheer physicality is more frightening
than that of wolves. Beyond livestock, life is much more difficult for a bear living in the
Kunlun Shan or a typical Tibetan valley than for a wolf. Bears cannot hunt in packs to
subdue large ungulates, and vegetation that would support such a large body is scarce in
such alpine deserts. From observations and analyses of feces, it appears the ever-flexible
and omnivorous brown bear that occupies the high ranges of western China depends largely
on excavating pikas, marmots, or other small mammals for its maintenance. Vegetation
is no doubt consumed, but it appears to require both the presence of small mammals and
soils amenable to digging for bears to feed themselves in this difficult landscape. And
that's not to mention yet the price put on their gall bladders; bears having the additional
bad luck of producing bile acids with just enough uniqueness to have found their way into
the traditional Chinese pharmacopoeia. Unsurprisingly, brown bears in western China
would have to qualify as “rare.”