SPECIES STORIES - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 165

Complaints from pastoralists that they are being overrun with wild ass are best regarded
with a doubting but sympathetic eye. From the skeptical side, it is to be expected that
pastoralists, whose lives are never easy under the best of circumstances, will exagger-
ate the number of wild ass they see and the damage caused to pastures needed by their
domestic livestock. A herd of one or two hundred wild ass rumbling through a valued
livestock pasture makes a strong impression, and these may be recalled with greater clar-
ity than the more frequent times in which no ass are seen for days on end. 148 Stories of
range damage from a single herder may be picked up by others, becoming folk legend
long before anybody has a chance to investigate how often it occurred.
On the other hand, there is little doubt that Tibetan wild ass eat almost exclusively the
high-quality Stipa grasses that are also coveted by pastoralists. As relatively inefficient
hind-gut fermenters, wild ass (in common with all Equids) must eat a great deal to fuel
their large bodies, and their large, hard hooves can also be rough on fragile alpine soils.
Their dietary overlap with domestic livestock, their large appetites, and their large herd
sizes can combine to form a terrifying picture from the perspective of a pastoralist at-
tempting to husband grasslands for his own use. Missing, alas, are reliable data that could
help us understand how serious a problem wild ass can be, and how frequent (or rare)
truly damaging events are. Because of their capacity for moving over large areas, wild
ass may impact a single pastoralist greatly but his neighbors not at all. The true extent of
the problem has never been adequately researched, but it is clear that many pastoralists
believe there is one. 149
In recent years, wildlife officials in Tibet and elsewhere have begun speaking openly
about the concerns of these pastoralists, and are considering reducing the number of wild
ass in response. 150 Although any official sanction of killing animals generally seen to be
“rare” will no doubt raise hackles (primarily among those outside China), some reduction
of Tibetan wild ass is most likely good policy. When a population of large, wild herbivores
increases to the point where people who live on the land are imposed upon greatly, some
accommodation is needed. A mature wildlife conservation system in any country would,
at this point, look for ways to allow for peaceful coexistence, and this no doubt would
include some killing of wild animals.
The rub is that not only are Tibetan wild ass still classified in China as a first-class pro-
tected species (thus requiring permits from national, not merely provincial, authorities for
any legal killing), but neither Tibet nor any province with increasing wild ass-pastoralist
conflict possesses even the beginnings of a wildlife management infrastructure that could
investigate the nature of the problem, administer a rational system of herd limitation,
or monitor the results of such an experiment. Perhaps even more critically, because the
underlying ideology is that common people must be kept at a distance from wildlife, and
that wildlife management is strictly a technical problem that must be left to government
technocrats, any reduction of Tibetan wild ass as currently conceivable would fail in its
greatest mission—that of reconnecting people in a visceral and tangible way to wildlife.
Rather than allow regulated hunting by the very pastoralists affected, or even allowing the
material benefits of any reduction (e.g., meat, hides) to flow to them via some objectively
managed allocation system, such a reduction is more likely to take the form of government