"In fact, there's nothing inherently wrong with utilizing animals," says ecologist Kurtis Pei. In the wild kingdom, animals constantly use one another at well as coexist. Other animals besides humans will also utilize resources and alter the natural environment. The only thing is that "the ten thousand things" balance each other and sustain each other under stable conditions.

But today, with the dramatic expansion of the human population and the pressure on the natural environment so intense, on the one hand people want to have these animals around to eat and utilize, but at the same time are developing (invading?) the habitats of these animals in a helter-skelter way. Large animals like the elephant, the rhino, and the whale need the largest habitats, so they have become the first wave of victims of the spread of human civilization.

You want the pony, but you don't want the pony to eat the grass. That, of course, is a pipe dream. Besides the larger creatures, the number of sharks and swallows which provide the materials for shark fin or bird's nest soup are also on the decline. The number of tigers in the wild has also reached a crisis point.

Unless we say that it makes no difference whether we kill them all and eat them all, and to heck with future generations, then there must be restrictions or an outright stoppage on their use.

But completely prohibiting their use involves altering established patterns of human behavior, and is equivalent to asking people for a major change in their own culture. "Conservation methods which imply altering cultures are difficult indeed," concludes Kurtis Pei.

Banning the use of rhino horns is the best example. Trying to change the African tradition of hunting the rhino and the Asian tradition of turning the horns into medicines is the same as trying to simultaneously alter the traditional cultures of two peoples, so naturally there has been a tremendous backlash.

In fact, the greatest offenders in the alteration of resources in many places are by no means the local residents themselves, but external forces which create a local cultural and ecological disaster. For example, when the white man first went to the American west, he massacred the bison in droves, and even produced "Buffalo Bill" who could kill 4,000 head of wild bison in a day. There are also countless examples of the hunting to extinction of wild animals in Africa by European or American" sportsmen."

On the other hand, for the local people who have set down roots and settled in a place, in order to insure their lifestyle is sustainable, they are not likely to make exhaustive use of their resources. The local ecology thus retains a stable relationship in order to reach a condition of a balance of management and utilization.

The Chinese of old were more than familiar with such logic. In the "King Liang Hui" chapter of Mencius it is written: Don't use too-fine nets to catch fish in order to avoid trapping the young ones and wiping them out. In this way, "use with restraint, take only in its time" became just the formula for sustainable use.

The elephants in Zimbabwe today make a classic case in point. The elephant was listed in the Washington Treaty as an endangered species, and its use was for bidden. The result was that five or six countries with native elephant populations threatened to with draw from the treaty. Thereafter there was agreement that if the elephant population could be kept stable, these would be turned over to the local people to care for, and quotas would be set for numbers that could be sold to foreign zoos or for the trade in elephant ivory. The result is that in fact the herds in Zimbabwe are increasing.

Besides altering living habits, today for poor nations, protecting the environment seems like an "extravagant" matter. For example, some of the national parks in African nations can be as large as half the size of all Taiwan. Many local residents can only think that these areas are protected for tourism for the wealthy, while the profits are minimal, so there is no real incentive for Conservation.

Hsiao Tai-chi, an associate researcher in the Institute of Economics at the Academia Sinica, states that the most recent versions of resource economics argue that since there is already world recognition that these resources are common assets that should not be driven to extinction, then a global exchange market should be set up to allow people from allover the world to lend support and protect them. Local people thus have a source of income, while the animals can flourish, and there are no worries about eradication. And the people who originally utilized these animals have no need to change their ingrained habits.

In countries of Europe and North America, many local governments sell hunting licenses and use the income for conservation and to propagate life. This provides hunters with their prey yet insures that there-can be perpetual use.

In other words, if people could really successfully raise rhinos so that there would be no fear of annihilation, and perhaps they might even flourish, then don't even mention using them for medicinal purposes--you could even go right ahead and slaughter them without anymore thought than people today give to chickens or ducks they will eat. The situation for sharks' fins or swallows' nests is the same. In fact, some of the fins on the market today have been raised in captivity, so a complete ban on their use wouldn't make much sense.

As for tiger penis or tiger bone, because creatures of the cat family have the ability to propagate quickly, the numbers of big cats in many zoos --given conditions where they eat their fill, get enough sleep, and have little to do--is growing rapidly. Many zoos simply will no longer accept gifts of large cats from outsiders. Indeed, even bears can be subject to "humanitarian" sterilization or castration because they are overly pampered and are reproducing too quickly.

So some scholars suggest that if people in Taiwan, who are already over-nourished, still have the desire to consume tiger penis, drink tiger bone wine, eat bear paw, or turn bear gall into medicine, then this could help zoos resolve their problem.

But if people continue to eat and drink avariciously, and on the other hand do nothing to maintain the animal populations, then--not to mention the humanitarian considerations--in the end there really will be nothing left to eat but chickens, ducks, pigs, and cows. It would then be next to impossible to try something a little different for variety's sake. Even then, is the relationship between people and animals limited to eating?

After having moved from living with nature to exploiting nature to developing it to the point of destroying it, people now want to go back to square one. But the alteration of the environment means that a "utilization and propagation" method must be quite different than in the past.

In the past, when mankind had to adapt itself to nature, there was an inclination to so-called sustainable use. People lived with simple rules like "don't hunt fawns," or "don't catch small fry." But today, it has become a case of mouthing ideals which fail to convince the mass of people. So sustainable management can often only be implemented in limited areas with human intervention and techniques.

There is an example of this from abroad. Because there was management of wild deer in order to insure supplies for hunting, the result was that the number of deer exploded, threatening the existence of other creatures.

Today many people are determining the value of animals on the scale of human values, so that animals have already become things subject to the will of humans. One day, although there will perhaps be little fear of the extermination of the wild animals around us, all will have become essentially pets, experimental animals, or livestock, or other wise will only be able to live in "reservations" marked out by humans, which is something that ecologists most wish to avoid.

Sustainable management and use are perhaps the methods for coexistence with animals that are at the moment most accessible to and most appropriate for people. But do people really only want to maintain the existence of, as Lao Tse called them," the ten thousand things," only for our own use?

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The African elephant is the best example of a case of human management for sustainable use. (photo by Cheng Yuan-ching)