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rently illegal. Second, pastoralists have recently been dispossessed of any weaponry they
might use to kill wildlife. But both of these problems, obvious as they are, are amenable
to technical or administrative fixes. Even without a fundamental change in the Wildlife
Protection Law (or its parallel legislation at provincial levels), allowances might be made
so that intermediaries are permitted to take limited quantities of protected species. Even if
government policy is unwilling to countenance the return to an armed pastoral population,
ways might be found to allow hunting weapons to be kept at secure locations, checked
out (or even rented) temporarily during prescribed seasons by permitted individuals, and
thus controlled primarily by the security-conscious state sector.
The more difficult issues are those of mortality control, incentives to maintain habi-
tat, and of course, a willingness to allow citizens individual access to state property. At
present, no institutions to treat the first two issues exist within China; they would have
to develop, presumably, out of the existing (but reformed) trophy hunting programs. As
well, current policy assumes that no political entity lower than the province is capable of
managing or controlling harvest of wildlife, a commonly held resource. Implicit in current
laws and regulations is strong distrust of local people and any informal institutions that
might be developed at a local level. Notwithstanding the prominence given to the concept
of rational use in laws and documents, rationality is not a virtue assumed to characterize
any citizen other than those working for a government bureau or Party office. “Give them
a centimeter and they'll take a kilometer” is the unstated governmental position.
There is, to be sure, an element of risk associated with my suggestion that limited
subsistence hunting be granted legitimacy in western China. It would be folly to claim
that traditional knowledge is always best, or that traditional societies naturally adopt
conservation as a practice.
4
However, local hunting remains legal in three neighboring
countries dominated by pastoral cultures—Mongolia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.
5
This
is not to suggest that hunting has by itself solved any problems there; all three countries
face great challenges in conserving wildlife, including limiting unsustainable harvests.
But hunting by local pastoralists has, at the least, provided a platform upon which bet-
ter regulatory systems can evolve. As well, it seems to me that the danger of unbridled
overexploitation from locals is contingent on a number of factors that might be examined
objectively (even if quantitative data on any are lacking). These can help us assess how
high the risks are, and whether benefits that might be accrued to local people and to
wildlife conservation in general would be high enough to justify them. I have synthesized
these factors in Figure 10.1.
First, wild species vary in their resilience to human-added mortality. I have summarized
this variation along the right-hand axis of Figure 10.1. It is not merely a matter of the
equilibrium density to which the animals will tend to rise in the absence of hunting, but
also of the population's response to hunting (summarized by the term “resource renewal
rate”). Species that reproduce quickly but die young are better able to sustain hunting than
are those that reproduce slowly over a long time-span. This will be particularly true if the
species is also relatively dense (fortunately, the two are usually positively correlated).
Second, the degree to which hunters operate in a market setting is likely to affect sus-
tainability. If wildlife is a fungible product that can be exchanged for anything else, any
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