Bigfoot Encounters.com
China
Bans Yeti-Hunting Safaris
14 January 1999 -- BEIJING (Agence France Presse) - China on Thursday announced its firm opposition
to tourist safaris aimed at capturing the yeti, maoran, the yeh-ren, the
abominable
snowman of legend said to roam China's central mountain regions.
"Such conduct is undoubtedly wrong and is incompatible with our present
need to protect the environment," Feng Zuoqian, a zoologist for the Chinese
Academy of Sciences, told the state-run China Daily.
According to the report, the State Forestry Administration (SFA) formally
announced its opposition to local entrepreneurs eyeing potential riches in
a yeti-hunting campaign during an ecological tourism symposium held Tuesday
in Beijing.
Officials at the Shennongjia nature reserve in central Hubei province, where
the legendary "Big Foot" has reputedly been spotted on several occasions,
had proposed to hand out some 10,000 tourist permits and offer a prize of
500,000 yuan ($60,000) for the capture of the yeti.
But the SFA expressed firm opposition to the tourist safaris, stressing that
the romps for holiday-makers would "have nothing to do with scientific
expeditions conducted by experts."
After years of debate between pro- and anti-yeti factions in China's scientific
community, Beijing authorities quashed the debate last month by announcing
once and for all that the abominable snowman does not exist.
The Xinhua news agency carried on the party line Thursday, reporting that
the yeti's existence had never been scientifically proven and that both a
skull and a piece of the creature's hair would be necessary to prove it was
real.
Several scientific expeditions have been dispatched to the Shennongjia region
in attempts to corroborate peasant sightings of the man-like, two-meter (six-and-a-half-foot)
high creature.
Footprints as long as 40 centimeters (16 inches), as well as thick red hairs
not belonging to any identifiable animal, have also recently been discovered.
The fiery debate has not been entirely extinguished in China.
According to anthropologist Zhou Guoxing, "even if 95 percent of the
reports on the existence of the wild man are not credible, it is necessary
for scientists to study the remaining 5 percent."
Copyright InsideChina.com
http://www.insidechina.com/china/news/06.html
Back to Bigfoot Encounters Main page
Back to Newspaper & Magazine Articles
Back to Bigfoot Encounters "What's New" page