TROPHY HUNTING - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 185

with the county grazing (or grassland) bureau. If county authorities wish to authorize a
mining operation that could disturb wildlife (as they have within the Subei and Dulan
hunting areas), hunting area managers can merely shrug their shoulders. When itinerant
gold miners flooded into Aksai, turning riparian areas into toxic wastelands (and possibly
poaching wildlife while they did so), hunting area officials not only had no authority to
stop them, they were insufficiently armed and equipped to even patrol the drainages the
miners occupied. 46
In Qinghai, plans currently exist to upgrade the existing road that runs over the crest of
the Kunlun Shan (through the Gouli section of the Dulan hunting area) from a hazardous,
dry-weather-only track (best left to those on horseback) into an all-weather highway. This
will shorten the route that freight-hauling trucks must currently drive between Golmud
and points in southeastern Qinghai by many hundreds of kilometers. In so doing, it will
also increase human disturbance in the Dulan hunting area substantially. But despite their
reservations, Dulan staff know they have no say in the matter. They can only hope the
highway's impact will be minor. In Gansu, plans exist to build a dam on the Kharteng
River (which flows through the middle of KIHA), inundate prime winter habitat for argali
and wild yaks, and build an enormous water diversion project that would pump water into
the neighboring Dang He drainage (where it would, eventually, be used for irrigation by
agricultural Dunhuang). This is precisely the sort of habitat transformation that the incen-
tive system, based on enthusiasm and funds generated by trophy hunting, is intended to
preclude. 47 But whether or not the Kharteng diversion project is built will depend on the
availability of funding from higher levels, or perhaps other political forces. Nobody is
asking for, and nobody will listen to, the concerns of the hunting area staff, who realize
what its effects on both wildlife and hunting will likely be.
To be sure, the presence of hunting area staff has had the positive effect of reducing
poaching. At a time when poaching was such a serious threat that other threats seemed
minor and remote in comparison, any reduction in poaching, even if incomplete, was a
tremendous contribution. Some would-be poachers probably stopped simply because they
supported the efforts of hunting area staff; others were no doubt deterred by the increased
risk of discovery and punishment. Hunting area staff were authorized to apprehend and
report (although not to actually arrest) poachers, 48 and I have little doubt that wildlife
populations responded positively to this initiative. But the species of interest to trophy
hunters have all been legally protected, regardless of where they live, since at least the
enactment of the 1988 Wildlife Protection Law (in most cases, prior to that). Anti-poach-
ing actions within hunting areas simply enforced a law that held equal validity wherever
the species lived. As well, with increased consciousness about poaching generally, and
with the confiscation of all firearms in the late 1990s specifically, poaching—at least by
local pastoralists—became an increasingly minor threat to wildlife, whether inside of
hunting areas or not. If the justification for trophy hunting rested on its ability to stop
local poaching, that justification was now gone. If the raison d'être of trophy hunting
was to pay people (directly or indirectly) to stop poaching animals in their midst (but it
otherwise provided them no benefit), it could now pack up its bags and go home, because
local people no longer had the means to poach. 49