THE graceful Tibetan antelope, one of the most endangered animals in China, has bounced back following a crackdown on poachers and an international campaign to halt the trade in its coveted wool.

At the beginning of the 20th century several million Tibetan antelope — chiru — roamed the Tibetan plateau.

By the beginning of the 21st century there were only about 50,000 left on the “roof of the world”. But Chinese officials say the number has now soared to 130,000 and the antelope is one of five animals chosen as mascots for the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

It is a rare success story and one that the Government is determined not to spoil through the launch last week of a train service that cuts across the antelope’s feeding grounds. Thirty-three animal migration passages have been built beneath the new railway that passes over the highest pass on Earth to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.

Video monitoring shows that more than 800 antelope have already passed under the railway. At first they paused when confronted with the strange structure across their migration routes, but after one animal ventured through, the rest of the herd followed. A much greater danger to the antelope has been poachers, who slaughtered tens of thousands of the elegant long-horned animals in the late 1980s and 1990s.

Their underfur is used to make shahtoosh shawls that used to sell for as much as £15,000 in London.

It takes at least four antelope to create one shahtoosh, which means “king of wools” in Persian. The warm, featherlight shawls are known as “ring shawls” in India because they are fine enough to slip through a ring.

The shahtoosh, beloved by the fashionable and wealthy from Delhi to New York, has been banned since 2002 to try to save the Tibetan antelope from extinction.

China has imposed and enforced a ban on poaching on the Chang Tang plateau in Tibet.

Illegal gold panners who used to supplement their income by hunting antelope have been removed. Police have cracked down on poachers who would drive over the plains, mowing down the antelope with AK47 assault rifles.

Dawa Tsering, the director of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) office in Tibet, cited the success of an international campaign to heap opprobrium on those who buy the shahtoosh. But he also credited pressure from Beijing on the local government to protect its environmental resources. He said: “The Tibet Government now thinks that this is a big issue and this has had a really big impact. Once they fixed their minds on the issue, it was easy for them to enforce.”

In March three poachers were sentenced to up to 13 years’ imprisonment for killing more than 150 antelope in the Chang Tang national park, which covers 600,000 square kilometres and is the world’s largest.

But with poachers able to earn as much as £80 for a single pelt in a region where the average annual income is about £600, the temptation is still great.

STRUGGLE FOR SURVIVAL

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