http://hits.guardian.co.uk/b/ss/guardiangu-feeds/1/H.25.4/94053?ns=guardian&pageName=Article%3Asnow-leopards-yaks-cashmere-gaots-fashion%3A1940657&ch=Environment&c3=GU.co.uk&c4=Conservation+%28Environment%29%2CEndangered+species+%28Environment%29%2CWildlife+%28Environment%29%2CEnvironment%2CAnimals+%28News%29%2CWorld+news%2CFashion%2CLife+and+style%2CIndia+%28News%29%2CChina+%28News%29%2CMongolia+%28News%29&c5=Fashion+and+Beauty%2CWildlife+Conservation%2CNot+commercially+useful%2CEthical+Living&c6=Damian+Carrington&c7=2013%2F07%2F23+03%3A03&c8=1940657&c9=Article&c10=News&c13=&c19=GUK&c47=UK&c64=UK&c65=Snow+leopards+and+wild+yaks+becoming+%27fashion+victims%27&c66=Environment&c72=&c73=&c74=&c75=&h2=GU%2FEnvironment%2FEnvironment%2FConservation
Surge in global trade in cashmere is driving up goat numbers, leaving less grass for antelopes on whom the predators depend
Snow leopards, wild yaks and other iconic wildlife on the world's highest mountains and great steppes are becoming "fashion victims" of the surging global trade in cashmere, new research has revealed.
Scientists found wildlife being driven to the margins of survival by the "striking but unintended consequences" of huge increases in the numbers of the goats producing the luxurious lightweight wool. The herds eat up the grass that previously supported antelopes, wild asses and their predators. Further problems were retaliatory killings of leopards and wolves by herders after livestock attacks, the killing of wild animals by herders' dogs and the transfer of disease from livestock to wild animals.
"In the absence of commitment across global and local scales, this iconic wildlife will cease to persist as they have for millennia, concluded an international team of researchers in the journal Conservation Biology (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cobi.12100/abstract). "Rather than serving as symbols of success, these species will become victims of fashion." The study showed that 95% of all the forage across the Tibetan plateau, Mongolia and northern India was consumed by goats, sheep and other livestock, leaving just 5% for wild animals.
"They are really on the margins," said one of the team, Charudutt Mishra at India's Nature Conservation Foundation and a previous winner of a prestigious Whitley award. Among the wildlife being squeezed out are the Przewalski horse, bactrian camels, Tibetan antelopes and siaga.
"But it is not an easy issue because producing cashmere does benefit local communities and economic development is essential," said Mishra. "I care about the snow leopard but I also genuinely care about those people and their livelihoods. The solution is about empowering them." Examples of small projects that have helped so far, he said, are paying bonuses for cashmere goods produced by communities that do not shoot snow leopards or poach wild animals, improvements to the corrals in which the goats live to prevent leopards killing them and vaccination of goats to prevent the spread of disease. In Pakistan, an insurance scheme for livestock has reduced retaliatory killing of snow leopards (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/aug/12/endangered-snow-leopard).
Mishra said there was time, though not much, to make such schemes more widespread and protect the wildlife. He said it was not difficult to persuade communities of the need for conservation: "You don't have to preach, people inherently see the value."
The UK is among the top four importers of Mongolian cashmere, a trade which has grown into a multi-billion dollar industry. In Mongolia alone, numbers of domestic goats have grown from 5 million in 1990 to almost 14 million in 2010. Ninety percent of cashmere comes from China and Mongolia.

Conservation (http://www.guardian.co.uk/conservation/)
Endangered species (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/endangeredspecies)
Wildlife (http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/wildlife)
Animals (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/animals)
India (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/india)
China (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/china)
Mongolia (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/mongolia)

Damian Carrington (http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/damiancarrington)

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Another sad but typical case. Resources with which people have co-existed for millenia suddenly come under severe pressure, how does this happen? This does not often happen with human living sustenance lives. It becomes more likely to happen in more primitive commodity societies, but the damage is limited by the low development of markets and transportation. It is only with the advent of capitalism that such wholesale resource depletion occurs with such sickening regularity. The great whales teemed in the Atlantic, surviving hundreds of years of human hunting until Yankees turned whaling into a business and wiped out those herds, exterminating the Atlantic Gray, before Melville set pen to paper. Passanger pigeons were doing alright until railroads reached their breeding grounds and shipped many millions of their salted carcasses East, along with the trees they nested in. The near extermination of the buffalo, though primarily motivated by the genocidal attack upon Native Americans, was greatly facilitated railroads creating a market for their hides and pickled tongues.

It is the scale of exploitation, which capitalism always strives to increase, which is at the heart of the biodiversity crisis, which may well be a Great Extinction before we're done. World fisheries are nearing the point of collapse, East Asia gets most of it's protein from the sea, what then? It is not too many people but rather the massive ineffiency of capitalism which makes this so. Capital produces exchange value very efficiently, but while there must be some use value that is of secondary concern. By-catch, a necessary feature of capitalist exploitation of the fisheries, destroys more sea life than it harvests. This may be of no account on the corporate ledger sheet but it is destroying the use value of the sea for billions of people. Ya can't eat exchange value.

The case of this OP is particularly pernicious as the product in question, cashmere, is entirely consumed by the bourgeiose and their wannabes. So too with the impending extinction of elephants and rhinos, caught bewteen a new rising capitalist class and their ancient cultural preferences. It is particularly aggravating when there is no real human need involved, just a desire for gewgaws and status. In the future we will all be Epicureans.

And what of the goat herders, the producers of this value? I think we can rest assured that they are seeing very little of the benefit of their labor, and if capitalism is true to form, probably less overall. Their lives can improve in a thousand ways that do not involve capitalism.

Another sad but typical case. Resources with which people have co-existed for millenia suddenly come under severe pressure, how does this happen? This does not often happen with human living sustenance lives. It becomes more likely to happen in more primitive commodity societies, but the damage is limited by the low development of markets and transportation. It is only with the advent of capitalism that such wholesale resource depletion occurs with such sickening regularity. The great whales teemed in the Atlantic, surviving hundreds of years of human hunting until Yankees turned whaling into a business and wiped out those herds, exterminating the Atlantic Gray, before Melville set pen to paper. Passanger pigeons were doing alright until railroads reached their breeding grounds and shipped many millions of their salted carcasses East, along with the trees they nested in. The near extermination of the buffalo, though primarily motivated by the genocidal attack upon Native Americans, was greatly facilitated railroads creating a market for their hides and pickled tongues.

It is the scale of exploitation, which capitalism always strives to increase, which is at the heart of the biodiversity crisis, which may well be a Great Extinction before we're done. World fisheries are nearing the point of collapse, East Asia gets most of it's protein from the sea, what then? It is not too many people but rather the massive ineffiency of capitalism which makes this so. Capital produces exchange value very efficiently, but while there must be some use value that is of secondary concern. By-catch, a necessary feature of capitalist exploitation of the fisheries, destroys more sea life than it harvests. This may be of no account on the corporate ledger sheet but it is destroying the use value of the sea for billions of people. Ya can't eat exchange value.

The case of this OP is particularly pernicious as the product in question, cashmere, is entirely consumed by the bourgeiose and their wannabes. So too with the impending extinction of elephants and rhinos, caught bewteen a new rising capitalist class and their ancient cultural preferences. It is particularly aggravating when there is no real human need involved, just a desire for gewgaws and status. In the future we will all be Epicureans.

And what of the goat herders, the producers of this value? I think we can rest assured that they are seeing very little of the benefit of their labor, and if capitalism is true to form, probably less overall. Their lives can improve in a thousand ways that do not involve capitalism.

Well said....