TROPHY HUNTING - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 168

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T ROPHY H UNTING
Opportunities Squandered
Hunting is an exceptional form of sustainable use that has been proven to create
conservation stakeholders, to stimulate conservation incentives and generate operating
revenue for conservation budgets; hence, it is one of the foremost forces for conservation.
—Conservation Force Web site
SCI [Safari Club International] members don't hunt
or fish to conserve animals. They hunt to hunt.
—John Jackson, former SCI president, founder and president of Conservation Force
In my conversations with county-level employees at trophy hunting areas in western China,
an awkward question frequently arises. These staff, generally ethnic Mongols, Tibetans, or
Kazaks, are not fazed by dealing with a Westerner; they live in the field among Europeans
and North Americans for a few weeks each year, and have long since lost any sense of
naiveté or wonder they may once have had. But I arrive carrying binoculars and a computer,
not a gun. Almost all other westerners they have met are, in their view, “hunters.” Am I,
they often wonder, also a “hunter”? Answering this question requires stretching both my
vocabulary and their concepts of hunting. To respond, I must explain that hunting for me,
as for the overwhelming majority of North Americans who carry a gun to forest or field
each autumn, is a fundamentally different activity than what the “hunters” they interact
with are doing. In fact, labeling anyone who engages in hunting as simply a “hunter”
risks overlooking the rich variety of human motivations, biological consequences, and
social institutions associated with killing and consuming wild animals.
Trophy hunting is generally taken as the killing of animals specifically for their trophy
value (usually horns or antlers of adult males, occasionally skins or full mounts) rather
than for food. Although hunting is an almost ubiquitous human activity, trophy hunting,
defined in this way, constitutes only a miniscule part of it. Trophy hunters go to Alaska
and western Canada to hunt brown bears, and to southern Africa to hunt elephants, lions,
and an array of hoofed animals. In lesser numbers, trophy hunters travel to Mongolia,
Tajikistan, Pakistan, and other Asian countries to hunt various mountain sheep and goats.
Sometimes their incentive is to see a new country or experience a new culture, sometimes
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