CHINESE WILDLIFE SCIENCE - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 196

the final result, for what it was worth, yielded an estimate of the number of sustainably
removed animal bodies, which is far different from the stated objective of estimating the
sustainable number of males carrying trophy-quality horns.
Here, in a nutshell, is the entire process: 10
[0.3][3,294] = 247
4
Were that it was so simple.
Given the quality and quantity of information available (six groups of argali observed
during a few-day visit to an area of few thousand km 2 ), few Western-trained wildlife bi-
ologists would have seriously attempted a quantitative estimate of yield. Even armed with
considerably better data, none would have recommended a harvest strategy based on such
a crude model. Instead, wildlife managers in the West routinely set harvest regulations
based on a combination of prior experience, rough indices of animal abundance, and a
steady system of feedback in which errors in the regulations (e.g., too liberal resulting in
excessive killing or too strict resulting in unsatisfied hunters) are periodically adjusted.
These systems are far from perfect, but perfection is not required (in part, because rec-
reational harvests are deliberately kept somewhat conservative, and there is no attempt
to derive the maximum possible harvest 11 ), nor is perfection deemed worth the cost and
effort by the public that provides the funding for agency monitoring and regulation.
The bargain that most governmental units with jurisdiction over hunted wildlife tacitly
make with their human constituents (on the one hand) and the wild species they manage
(on the other) is basically this: Complete understanding of the biological, social, and
economic dynamics involved in setting precise harvest regulations (and, for that matter,
enforcing them) is beyond our capability. The best we can do is to tweak regulations
here and there according to the signals we receive from the animal population, and to
direct the requests we receive from the public (or their representatives). We can do this
level of monitoring and tweaking—rough as it assuredly is—relatively cheaply and thus
maintain political support and the participation of a broad range of the public. The price
for our admittedly crude understanding of the biological dynamics and our admittedly
crude tools with which to manage harvests is that we will not expect to optimize any
component of the system, at least not in the short term. In any given year, society may
kill too many animals, and if so, we'll have to adjust in future years. In any given year,
society may kill fewer animals than could safely have been taken, and hunters accept that
opportunity cost as part of keeping the system inexpensive.
There is science involved in all this, yes. But note how the biologist involved with
this system maintains a studied humility regarding the fundamental biological dynamics
involved, despite what is likely to have been years spent obtaining an advanced degree,
and many more spent observing specific wildlife-human systems. It is not that we know
nothing at all about how wildlife populations operate in general, or even how particular
species respond to hunting. It is, rather, that we are mindful of just how complex ecologi-
cal systems truly are, and thus that even our most thoroughly studied systems can only