Though herdsmen in north Tibet kept complaining, their requests to carry out "family planning" on wild donkeys has failed to win the approval of local officials in Ngari Prefecture of southwest China's Tibet Autonomous Region.

"We have too many wild donkeys here in our pasture," said Baima Nanjor, a herdsman of the prefecture's Burang County. "They are going to destroy my pasture."

"I have begged local authorities to implement a 'family planning' policy for the wild donkeys since poaching was declared illegal," he said.

In fact, the increasing number of wild donkeys proved not only a headache for herdsmen like Baima Nanjor, but a dilemma for local governments which had striven to further protect those endangered species in the world's highest plateau over the past years.

The local legislature in Burang, Gegyai, Gerze and Coqen counties of the prefecture has also received similar bills calling for the protection of herdsmen's pastures from wild animals every year as reports of the animals' damage to local pasture continued to rise.

"Those wild donkeys are becoming more and more audacious. They never fear people," said Phuntsok, director of the Zanda County Bureau of Public Security. "We are under increasing pressure from the herdsmen to reduce the animal's population by poaching."

However, local officials preferred others means to protect herdsmen's interests rather than undertaking such "family planning" demands, saying they were "not appropriate" for the sake of species diversity in Tibet.

"I was always trying to persuade herdsmen and grassroots officials never to hurt the wild animals when they came to lodge their complaints," said Daindar, a wildlife protection official with the Ngari Prefecture Bureau of Forestry.

Once near extinction due to illegal poaching, wild donkeys and other rare animals in Tibet have been listed as one of China's top protected species since 1996 when local governments in Tibet banned preying of wild animals.

The protective measures paid off soon in the autonomous region.

The latest statistics from the Ngari Prefecture Bureau of Forestry show the number of those most endangered species under top state protection has hit more than 150,000, twice the residential population living in the prefecture.

Meanwhile, the wild donkeys number more than 60,000 currently, a rapid rise from about 20,000 eight years ago, according to the forestry bureau.

"It took only five years for the number of rare animals of wild donkeys, Tibetan antelopes, yaks and black neck cranes to pick up and exceed the residential population in the prefecture," said Daindar, 45, a herder in the prefecture.

"Poaching of rare animals still continues within the reserve, but all done by wolves and bears," he said.

To protect those most endangered species, China upgraded the already existent Qiangtang Nature Reserve in north Tibet to a state-level wildlife protection center in northern Tibet in 2000, putting wild animals in the Ngari Prefecture under state protection.

(Xinhua News Agency November 25, 2003)