TROPHY HUNTING - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 175

Canada, have now shown that, even in the face of these complexities, artificial selection
for undesired traits can indeed be imposed by trophy hunters. 25 By killing bighorn rams
shortly after they became of legal size, Alberta hunters produced a bighorn population
increasingly incapable of producing the trophies they themselves sought. In short, hunters
can, if not kill the golden-egg-laying goose, at least mold a slightly less valuable goose
that lays eggs with increasingly inferior gold.
The diminution of horn size in the Alberta bighorn population was gradual, and did not
in itself cause a crisis for the animals. The researchers did not even recommend a cessation
of trophy hunting for them, but rather a more conservative management regime, in which
males were allowed to achieve older age (and thus more breeding opportunities) before
becoming subject to legal harvest. Equally critical, the phenomenon of artificial selection,
while shown unequivocally to occur in the Alberta study population, was not necessar-
ily shown to be general or inevitable. Artificial selection pushing the characteristics of
animals in one direction was simply competing against natural selection pushing them in
another. In this case, the artificial selection was strong enough to have a real effect, but
it remained uncertain that this would be the case under any such hunting regime. Lower-
intensity hunts, even those focused solely on males with hunter-desired traits, might well
succeed in allowing natural selection to continue operating. 26
Studies such as that in Alberta are highly intensive and require not only large funding
bases but many years to carry out. Needless to say, such studies have not been conducted
for any species in China, and it seems unlikely they will be in the foreseeable future. Thus,
there is little choice but to cautiously and thoughtfully apply the lessons learned from
these bighorns to trophy hunting programs in China. The primary lesson would appear
to be this: If hunts are highly selective, offtake rates must be conservative. Refugia that
provide habitat for animals not subjected to the selective hunt could also be instrumental
in maintaining the genetic integrity of the hunted population (if they are close enough
to provide migrants during the breeding season). The number of large males taken by
hunters must not be so high as to substantially reduce the number remaining for normal
breeding behavior.
But here again, all available evidence suggests that, from a population biology per-
spective, Chinese trophy hunting is on safe ground: trophy offtake rates have been low. 27
Although population estimates are notoriously unreliable, Chinese hunting areas have
been established only in those areas where focal species are relatively abundant. The sheer
cost and logistics of mounting such an international hunt, together with the attractiveness
of alternative species in other countries, has meant that few hunters have participated,
and thus that trophy offtake has been modest. For example, in the Aksai hunting area in
Gansu, which has produced the best available documentation of both population size and
trophy offtake of argali, the number of rams taken from 1990 through 2004 has amounted
to a mean of roughly 1.2 percent of the total population number. Although not a definitive
indicator, the fact that the mean age of argali killed during 1990-2003 was a relatively
8.2 years old, and that neither age nor size of trophies had declined with time, both sug-
gested that offtake rates had been conservative. 28
Of course, concern about artificial selection remains, and should trophy hunts increase