Where the Wild Things Are

One day recently I was having a lunchtime conversation with a fellow teacher. He is the one most likely to go camping, hiking, or any similar kind of roughing it. Early on, his teaching the students how to start a fire with a bow drill earned him the nickname Mountain Man.

So Mountain Man and I were talking and we noted a shared observation—there isn’t much in the way of wildlife here in Shenyang. We see the resident magpies and an occasional sparrow, but beyond that there’s not much to see. M. M. even commented about the surprised thrill that filled him the other day when he saw a pair of migrating ducks. I made him realize how rare such sightings are. Wild animals are conspicuous by their absence.

That absence has a profound impact. Certainly people like M. M. and I are left deprived of the feeling that we get when we see some natural creature that is not under the sway of humans. We miss those glimpses into a world that we, as a dominant species, don’t control. But at least he and I know it’s out there. I had a sobering moment in class one day when the students were supposed to act like the characters in a Native American story. They didn't understand the wing flapping and high altitude soaring that I mimed for the character of the goose. When I asked why they didn’t know what animal I was imitating, one student told me that geese don’t fly. It hit me hard that their knowledge about geese was limited to the behavior of the large white birds that they have only seen in farmyards waddling and honking their way across the ground. Those geese are bred or clipped so they can’t fly.

It got me thinking. What wild animals could a young Chinese person reasonably expect to see? In Shenyang the answer is pretty much none. We don’t even see rats that should be proliferating given the amount of trash there is in the alleys, ditches, and waterways.

I wondered about elsewhere in China. Could a Yunnanese youngster be counted on to see yaks? Could a kid from Gansu take a gander at a gnu? or a gorilla? or even a gopher? Are there antelopes in Anhui? Bighorn sheep in Shanxi?

I know from Chinese news broadcasts that the Tibetan antelope is a special animal and great care was taken during the construction of the new railroad to Lhasa to protect the migration routes of this endangered herbivore. I’ve seen special reports on the volunteers who stop the traffic on the roads in Tibet so that the herds can cross safely.

I also know that lions and tigers are considered important creatures in China. But most of that comes from the myths and folktales that I’ve read and heard, the presence of the tiger in the Chinese zodiac, and the stone lions I see standing guard outside restaurants, banks, and even our apartment.

Of course there’s the panda. That’s practically the symbol of China. I visited Chengdu and the giant panda breeding center there. I know there are also reserves in other parts of Sichuan where the pandas live in the wild.

But all that seems like destination wildlife. The humdrum, everyday kind of wildlife—great blue herons, raccoons, deer, woodpeckers, squirrels—that you can see in almost any American suburb or the slightly more unusual—hawks, coyotes, otters, owls, opossums, muskrats, armadillos—don’t seem to exist here.

In order to see wild animals Chinese students need to do what ours did a couple of Saturdays ago. They need to go on a field trip to a zoo. I know that zoo animals aren’t wild animals, but they’re related to the ones that live in the wild and at least look like their wild cousins.

Here in Shenyang we live close to Qipanshan (which I only recently learned means Chessboard Mountain), and Qipanshan is home to the Shenyang Wild Animal Forest Park. Yes, if you google the forest park you will encounter articles from spring 2010 when, according to some reports, eleven Siberian tigers died there after suffering from malnutrition, neglect, and the extreme cold of Shenyang’s winter. You may even see that some claim the tigers were purposely let die so that their organs and bones could be sold on the black market. Of course it could be that the dead tigers really came from the Bingchuan Zoo, which might be totally separate from the Shenyang Wild Animal Forest Park.

So the tigers at the zoo we took our students to may not be the survivors of that recent tiger tragedy. They might have inhabited the Wild Animal Area where busloads of visitors drive past and photograph them in their semi-spacious enclosures. Or they might be the four white tigers that live in typical concrete-floored, moat-surrounded, and fake rock mountain-backed, cells. They may never have known anything about the fate of the other eleven.

Visitors to the Shenyang Wild Animal Forest Park could not buy live chickens to toss to the tigers like the visitors to Dalian’s zoo can. Visitors to the Dalian zoo can also buy live animals (mostly chickens but some rabbits) to toss to the hyenas. I know because some of my fellow teachers who went to Dalian for our colleague’s wedding last month visited the zoo there and saw the feeding going on. No, at the Shenyang Wild Animal Forest Park you can only buy fruit to toss to the bears and monkeys. Both of those “wild animals” are quite adept at fielding and hanging onto apples and pears no matter how bad the aim of the visitor doing the tossing.

Our students didn’t feed the animals. They were there with the knowledge that their science class was going to be starting an ecology unit and somehow what they saw at the zoo would relate. So they watched the tigers from the bus. They watched the other people feeding the bears and monkeys. They watched the 12:30 trained sea lion act in which two sea lions did tricks for fish rewards. And, besides magpies and sparrows, this may be the only wild animals they see for a long time.

They still might be surprised that geese can fly.