A FUTURE FOR WILDLIFE IN WESTERN CHINA - Wildlife Conservation in China: Preserving the Habitat of China's Wild West - page 220

Figure 10.4 A conceptual diagram of the potential for sustainability, comparing musk deer
with rhinoceros. Although musk is quite valuable on a weight basis, the value per
individual animal is moderate, and the sensitivity of musk deer populations to
their survival rate is not high (by the standards of large mammals); they thus have
moderately high potential to be harvested sustainably. By contrast, rhinos have a
very high value per individual animal, and their populations are also very sensitive
to survival rate; thus, they have extremely low potential to sustain a commercial
harvest.
Musk
deer
Rhino
tractive that controls on mortality are impossible to apply. Might there be species whose
lives, required to produce the commodity, are priced so highly that no conceivable system
can conserve them if trade is legitimized? That is, are there species that return so much
profit per capita that any legal killing and trade would quickly lead to uncontrollable and
unsustainable harvest rates? I think all species of rhinoceros fit this description (or, at
least, that any successful conservation system for them would be absurdly intrusive and
expensive), but that musk deer do not (see Figure 10.4). For one thing, rhinos reproduce
very slowly under the best of circumstances, so they have very limited capability to
withstand added human-caused mortality.
But the economics also differ. Although numerous reports use the phrase “worth more
than their weight in gold” in reference to both musk and rhino horn, there remains a
conceptually important and quantitatively substantial difference: the revenue potentially
available from a single rhino is many times that of a single musk deer, and it is the per