The humans failed her, badly. The 785-square-mile Wolong wildlife reserve in China’s Sichuan province, where HanHan lived, is hardly guarded; Wolong police say they don’t have the time and Beijing doesn’t force the issue. So on the fogbound, snowy morning of Jan. 24,1983, Han-Han strangled to death in a poacher’s snare. The hunter-peasant carried the carcass and skin back to his hut. His wife cooked some of the meat with turnips, the peasant later said. “It did not taste good. So we fed it to the pigs.” The unspeakable waste, the assault on the creatures he studied and loved, made Schaller rage-at “the officials who talked and talked while ever more pandas slipped silently into darkness. Damn. Damn. Damn them all.”
Have we bungled the jungle? In “The Last Panda” (291 pages. University of Chicago Press. $24.95), to be published next week, Schaller lets loose with a shattering attack on the sham called panda conservation. In doing so, he has opened a new front in the wildlife wars. Taking on zoos, governments and international conservation groups that sanctimoniously swear fealty to the ideal of saving species, Schaller charges that stupidity, greed and indifference are causing mankind to hasten the loss of the world’s wildlife. The panda may be the most egregious example, but there are, tragically, others. Many others. From crocodile reserves in Colombia that have been turned into poachers’ paradises to international whaling bans that save one species only to keep others on the cusp of extinction, the message is sobering. “If most wildlife groups were a business,” fumes Earth Island Institute biologist Sam LaBudde, whose clandestine filming of dolphins caught in nets led to the 1988 tuna boycott, “they would be sued for fraud.”
A constellation of forces conspires against efforts to save animals, starting with poaching and the destruction of species’ habitat. But corrupt governments, inefficient bureaucracies and the muddling of even well-intentioned green groups add to the mix. Most disturbing is conservationists’ willingness to spend money to appease local government honchos. " You have to buy your way into a country-with vehicles, equipment, something," says Alan Rabinowitz, senior zoologist at The Wildlife Conservation Society. China, he discovered, actually has a formal list of the prices it charges foreigners to study particular species. Wildlife managers are often overmatched by corruption. Just last month a four-zoo consortium, formed in 1984 to capture Sumatran rhinos and breed them in captivity, gave up in frustration over spiraling payments that seemed not to be helping the hairy rhinos. Under its agreement with Indonesia, the $3.5 million Sumatran Rhino Trust had to pay the government $60,000 for each animal captured, ostensibly to protect the remaining creatures’ forest habitat against loggers. “We know we gave the Indonesians that money for rhino conservation,” says Jim Doherty of the Bronx zoo. He pauses. “That’s all we know.” Deadpans president Kathryn Fuller of the World Wildlife Fund, “Working in conservation can be a fascinating multicultural experience.”
Schaller, scientific director of WCS (the field biology arm of the Bronx zoo) and National Book Award winner for “The Serengeti Lion!’ in 1972, details countless such frauds, cover-ups, lies and fatal mistakes that may yet doom the giant panda to extinction. “I am placing the blame on every institution, whether American zoos or the Chinese government or World Wildlife Fund–anyone who did not think of the panda first,” Schaller told NEWSWEEK. Among his charges:
WWF had cosponsored Schaller’s research, but he pulls no punches in his criticism of the well-respected group whose very logo is the giant panda. WWF failed to “push an agenda on behalf of the panda in the wild,” charges Schaller. Instead it acquiesced in Beijing’s demand for the fanciest panda-research lab anywhere on earth. The new Wolong research and breeding facility got crammed with expensive equipment donated by WWF. But it was barely used. In WWF’s defense, a fat check may have been the only way to get Beijing’s permission to work in China. All but the most naive groups budget for “consulting fees” to foreign officials. The difficulty of working abroad is underscored by the small number that do it. “WWF has more failures because it’s made more effort,” says Michael Bean of the Environmental Defense Fund. But Schaller isn’t the only on-the-ground biologist disenchanted with WWF. A new joke asks, Why did the dinosaurs go extinct? Because WWF had a program to save them.
Zoos “vie for status, publicity and profit” through “rent a panda” deals, says Schaller. Beijing reaps millions of dollars in fees; zoos rake in more through increased attendance and T shirt sales. But panda rentals disrupt the breeding of a species that reproduces poorly in captivity even without transoceanic sabbaticals. When they take up longterm residence, any cubs they have rarely survive: since 1972 panda lovers had followed the tragic courtship of Washington National Zoo’s Ling-Ling, who had five cubs with her mate Hsing-Hsing, but for various reasons, not one lived. (Ling-Ling, whose picture is on the cover of this issue, died last December.) Despite zoos’ assurances, they “are not cooperating in seeing that conservation money goes toward saving the panda,” says Schaller. Like WWF, zoos have failed to press China to use the millions to truly help wild pandas. And announcements that the loans are for “breeding programs” are often no more than a cover. In May, Adventure World Zoo in Japan will get one male and one female panda from China, paying $10 million for the 10-year loan. China says it will use the money for panda conservation. Japan says it will try to breed the pair. But the zoo has no breeding program or experts, says WWF. “The loan appears to be mainly a commercial undertaking,” says WWF’s Stuart Parkins.
Beijing exerts little pressure on the provinces to cut down snares in the bamboo forests and comb the panda reserves for poachers. (Dealers and collectors in Japan, Hong Kong and Taiwan pay $40,000 for a panda skin good for nothing but hanging on a wall.) When Schaller emphasized the need for patrols, he was told the Wolong police were “too busy with other duties … though it was my impression that their daily task consisted chiefly of reading newspapers and drinking tea.” Others echo Schaller’s charge of misguided priorities. “The main thing being preserved are not animals but the lifestyles of officials,” says an animal specialist in Beijing who asked to remain anonymous: many local conservation officials consider a new Jeep Cherokee their top conservation priority. Some of the $4 million it gave China for the Wolong reserve went to build a hotel and a school for the children of resident Chinese scientists.
Schaller particularly faults Beijing for seeking any excuse to capture wild pandas, even though they die in captivity faster than they reproduce. Unlike other male mammals that are perpetually randy, male pandas come into heat only once a year. In captivity, it tends not to be when females are receptive. Even worse, babies taken to the Wolong center sometimes fall ill and die because of inexperienced and incompetent vets. (Once a Communist Party official performed a lethal feeding experiment on a cub.) During the bamboo die-off of 1983, China made a great show of rescuing “starving pandas” even though Schaller discovered that the pandas had plenty to eat. Of 108 pandas captured, 33 died, 35 were released into a different forest and 40 were sent to zoos or holding stations, like the one where they lived in “dark, cold [cages] encrusted with frozen urine and feces [where they] suffered silently,” relates Schaller. China had its most successful captive -breeding year ever in 1992-a record 11 of 13 newborns survived-but few biologists view that as the norm. “We don’t believe captive breeding works,” admits one Beijing scientist. “If we depend on zoos, the panda has no hope.”
Schaller’s broadside has forced environmentalists to rethink the accommodations they make with host governments, and a similar revisionism has struck even cases deemed unqualified conservation successes. Perhaps the animal lovers’ greatest recent triumph was the 1989 ban on trade in ivory, a move intended to stop the elephant slaughter in east Africa. Eliminating the ivory market has curtailed poaching even in countries, like Tanzania, that can’t afford to police their herds. In the early 1980s, poaching claimed 3,000 to 4,000 elephants a year in Kenya, and ivory brought $150 a pound. Now, with the black-market price down to $5 a pound, fewer than 50 elephants are poached annually (box, page 54).
But in a contrariant book being published this month, journalist Raymond Bonner, who lived in Nairobi for several years, attacks the “ecocolonial” conservation groups that rammed through the ban. He charges that their strategy portrayed anyone who favored a less absolute stance as heartless advocates of elephant killing. Such billing would have crippled fund raising for groups like WWF and zoos. But the herds of Botswana, Zimbabwe and South Africa can sustain selective culling and ivory harvesting, he argues in “At the Hand of Man” (302 pages. Knopf. $24). The ban deprives African nations of an estimated $50 million they could spend on wildlife reserves. (They could make it all up, though, by raising admission prices to their game parks $2: currently, Kenya charges $15; Zimbabwe, nothing.) The growing elephant population, charges Bonner, “has meant the destruction of the habitat for other species: … impala, giraffes, bushbabies and monkeys; kudus, bushbuck and genet.” Even ivory-trade foes admit that, in perhaps 10 years, east Africa’s herds may be large enough to allow legal ivory trade. The catch: making sure legal sales don’t provide a laundering system for illegal poaching.
But there are perils in legalizing what had once been contraband. In Colombia, poachers had nearly wiped out the Orinoco crocodile, American crocodile and black caiman (a croc cousin) in order to illegally export thousands of hides a year in the 1980s. To save the prehistoric reptiles, the government in 1987 began overseeing licensed breeding areas, where ranchers may raise caiman for profit as long as they release 5 percent of them to the wild. The idea was to control poaching by providing a legal alternative source. But the program has proven much better at making ranchers rich than making caiman safe: the farms serve as a cover for poaching. Tens of thousands of caiman hides labeled LEGAL EXPORTS were in fact captured illegally in the wild and laundered through the ranches. Not one of the 32 farms has released 5 percent of its production to the wild. And many farmers lie about the size of their stocks and hunt thousands more illegally: one farm reported having 15,000 caiman eggs, but an inspector counted only 3,000.
What happened to the other 12,000? The shortfall would be made up with caiman from the wild. Officials of Colombia’s Natural Resources Institute, which runs the ranch program, don’t deny the accusations. They just blame it on the lack of money and personnel to enforce regulations.
There is no clearer sign of rampant revisionism than the challenge to that very rallying cry of green activism, “Save the whales, “The International Whaling commission banned whaling seven years ago, but last year Norway resumed its hunt and this month its whalers are going back. Their rationale: catching a few hundred of the 86,000 minkes in the eastern North Atlantic is the essence of sustainable development that newest econbuzzphrase meaning “using a resource without using it up.” “If you say that one animal, however abundant, has an absolute right to life, you have harpooned the principle of sustainability,” says Georg Blichfeldt, secretary of a coastal alliance. “What you get are the principles of Disney World: whales become ‘fun animals’.” Even Norway’s environmentalists support the limited hunt in the interest of research. Is the whaling ban really a bungle? It is if the failure to harvest the minke harms other species. The minke may compete for the same truf and food as the blue whale; if the minke retains its huge population lead, the blue may never recover.
Sometimes the veneer of success can hide a disaster. Take Project Tiger, in which India set aside tiger reserves, trained wardens and equipped patrols. By most accounts, this saved the Bengal tiger from extinction. But, say critics like Wildlife Conservation’s Rabinowitz, the tiger’s numbers have been regularly inflated by reserve managers whose pay is tied to their performance and whose deception is winked at by conservation groups. “They needed a success story because these organizations can’t keep saying things are getting worse and worse,” charges Rabinowitz. “If they do, the public asks, ‘Why should I give money to a lost cause?”’ The result, Peter Jackson of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature told reporters last year, is less pressure to stop poaching and the illegal sale of tiger skins and bones, which are used in Chinese medicine. After years of seeing reports from Project Tiger that the number of great cats in India was rising, to 4,600, biologists now believe there are fewer than half that. The deception may have helped allow the population to shrink to a size that will doom it to extinction before 1999.
It’s easy to lay blame, whether on corrupt politicians or blinded-by-idealism wildlifers. But at least when fingers get pointed, solutions sometimes follow: in December China’s State Council approved a $52.6 million panda-conservation plan that doubles the number of reserves and creates “corridors” between them, moves out lumber firms and resettles local peasants. Beijing hopes to have one anti-poaching patrol per 2,500 acres of reserve (it’s 1 per 7,400 to 12,350 now). In the truly disheartening cases, the forces of extinction are so overwhelming that there seems to be no solution at all. NEWSWEEK’S Joseph Contreras traveled to Rhodes Matopos National Park in Zimbabwe last week to see that impoverished nation’s desperateand seemingly futile-attempt to save the black rhino. His report:
Since daybreak, six trackers in military uniforms and two veterinarians had been stalking a pair of black rhinos through the dense bush. They located their quarry: the crack of a dart gun rang out, and the 1,600-pound cow slumped against the bank of a muddy creek. After making sure she was in stable condition, Dr. Mark Atkinson fired up a chain saw and amputated the anesthetized animal’s horns-horns so highly prized by poachers from Zambia that now, only 305 black rhinos remain in Zimbabwe. Last May, to deter poachers who sell the horns to China, Taiwan and South Korea for their alleged pharmaceutical properties, Zimbabwe began amputating horns from black rhinos. (In 1991 it had begun dehorning white rhinos, of which only 198 remain in Zimbabwe and 6,000 in all of Africa.) So far, 123 whites and 140 blacks have been dehorned. And now Zimbabwe has grasped the full horror of the poaching problem. In the last 20 months, 10 dehorned whites and six dehorned blacks have been slaughtered by Zambian poachers intent on demonstrating that they can slip into the country and kill rhinos with impunity. Says Tony Ferrar of the Wildlife Society of Southern Africa, “It’s taught the Zimbabweans how futile their whole campaign against poaching has been.” The parks and wildlife department is broke; 250 scouts have been laid off and anti-poaching patrols scaled way back.
Is it all hopeless? Sam LaBudde of Earth Island Institute charges that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent on wildlife conservation have “maintained animals for the benefit of poachers and smugglers.” Only massive international pressure can choke both the supply of and the demand for endangered beasts. LaBudde calls for withholding foreign aid until a country implements tough anti-poaching and anti-smuggling programs. In some places, at least, the strategy has worked for other contraband: “It’s very difficult to get guns or heroin in Taiwan,” says LaBudde. “But it’s simple to get rhino horn, bear gallbladder or tiger bone.” Does the world have the resolve? “It’s going to take all the tigers disappearing, all the rhinos, all the elephants, all the mountain gorillas,” laments Ronald Tilson of the Minnesota Zoo. “Then maybe there will be a true war declared on behalf of endangered species.”
Until then, more pandas follow HanHan’s snowy footprints into the snares of Wolong, and poachers steal across the Zambian border to kill rhinos for the bragging rights. Zoos try frantically to breed endangered beasts, banking their eggs and sperm cryogenically in frozen Noah’s arks. Someday, maybe there will again be a place on earth for the beasts of the field. But that day may be long in coming. As Leonardo da Vinci observed 500 years ago, “All the animals languish, filling the air with lamentations.”
Species: GIANT PANDA Habitat: SICHUAN PROVINCE, CHINA Population in the Wild: 1,000 Estimated Population in the Year 2025: 5,000 to 0 Species: BENGAL TIGER Habitat: INDIAN JUNGLE Population in the Wild: 2,300 Estimated Population in the Year 2025: 0 Species: BLACK RHINO Habitat: AFRICAN BUSH Population in the Wild: 2,400 Estimated Population in the Year 2025: Possibly 0 Species: AFRICAN ELEPHANT Habitat: BUSH
