No Turning Back: The Extinction Scenario by Richard Ellis

Author:Richard Ellis
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
ISBN: 9781453271155
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-09-18T04:00:00+00:00

The saiga is not mentioned in the Chinese Materia Medica of 1597, because, according to the 1995 Traffic report by Chan et al., “as late as Li Shinzen’s time (the late sixteenth century), the real Saiga Antelope and its horn was largely unknown to the Chinese, let alone utilized in any way … there is no historical record of any Saiga horn trade between China and Central Asia along the Silk Road … [which] would have been the most likely route for trade in Saiga horn.” By 1989, however, in Zhang Enquin’s Rare Chinese Materia Medica, an entire section is devoted to Lingyangjiao, or Cornu Saigae Tataricae (Latin for “horn of Saiga tartarica”). We are warned to be on the lookout for counterfeits, such as the horn of the Mongolian gazelle (Procapra subgutturosa) or the Tibetan antelope (Pantholops hodgsoni), which might be processed to simulate the horn of the saiga. “After being soaked, dried, and ground to a powder, the horn, which is ‘salty in taste and cold in nature,’ can be used to check hyperactivity of the liver and relieve convulsion, treat the up-stirred liver wind, infantile convulsion and epilepsy; calm the liver and suppress hyperactivity of the liver-yang; it is efficacious in the treatment of dazzle and vertigo due to hyperactivity of the liver-yang; it improves acuity of vision, cures headache and conjunctival congestion; clears away heat and toxic material; and can be used to treat unconciousness, delirium and mania in the course of epidemic febrile diseases.” Like rhino horn, saiga horn is classified as a product “salty-cold in character and which can detoxify the body and reduce ‘heat’”(Chan et al. 1995).

There are four populations of saiga in Kazakhstan and Russia: Kalmykia, Ural, Ustiurt, and Betpak-Dala, and a small one in western Mongolia. All are declining, but in Betpak-Dala the numbers plummeted from half a million in 1993 to 4,000 in 2000, a drop of 99 percent. Between 1993 and 1998, the overall million-plus population was essentially halved as the horn-bearing males were culled. Eleanor Milner-Gulland and her colleagues wrote in 2001, “The lack of males in Kalmykia is causing the dramatically reduced conception rates, which, in addition to the high hunting mortality, could lead to population collapse.” Pearce’s article, in the New Scientist, is entitled, “Going the way of the dodo?” and includes this phrase: “In a bid to save the rhino, conservationists suggested using saiga horn instead of rhino horn in traditional medicines. Their plan has backfired as hunters run amok.” Rhino advocate Esmond Bradley Martin spearheaded the movement to substitute saiga horn for rhino horn, but when he realized that the saiga was close behind the rhino on the fast track to extinction, he publicly recanted. As Milner-Gulland et al. wrote in Nature in 2003:

Reproductive collapse in the critically endangered saiga antelope is likely to have been caused by a catastrophic drop in the number of adult males in this harem-breeding ungulate, probably due to selective poaching for their horns. … Horns are borne by

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