Monday, Jul. 16, 1979
Hapless Vicu
A prized beast is threatened
The Incas were so enamored of the beast that only the royal family was permitted to eat it or wear garments made from its wool. Under such protection, an estimated population of 2 million vicunna ran wild. But after the Incas' downfall the fragile creatures fell on hard times 'too Prized for their soft, fleecy wool (now selling for $90 a lb.),* the vicunas became the buffalo of the Andes: there were fewer than 10,000 in Peru by the late 1960s, and they were practically wiped out elsewhere.
But 1969 proved to be a temporary turning point. In that year a Peruvian government undertook to save the animals by creating a 16,000-acre preserve called Pampa Galeras in the windswept highlands in the southern part of the country. Peru also signed a pact with Bolivia that banned for ten years the hunting of vicuna and the sale of products made from the animal; subsequently, Chile and Argentina joined in the La Paz Convention. In 1973, 51 nations voted to place the vicuna on the endangered-species list and bar it from the commercial market.
Now all those good works may be undone. Peru, hard pressed for foreign exchange, and anticipating the expiration of the La Paz agreement next month, has embarked on a program to slaughter 5,000 male vicunas out of 29,500 animals in the preserve and surrounding area. The objective is not immediate sales but to preserve vicuna skins until their wholesale worth--already estimated at $5 million --goes up still higher.
Conservationist Felipe Benavides president of the Peruvian branch of the World Wildlife Fund, warns that the decision will ensure the species' doom. But government officials, notably Antonio Brack, who worked with the World Wildlife Fund until he was tapped to head the Special Project for the Rational Use of the Vicuna, deny that the beast is threatened. Brack insists that the population is increasing so rapidly (by 23% a year) that the culling should not have any harmful long-range effect.
Benavides is leading an international public relations campaign to get members of the La Paz Convention to extend the treaty. Unless he succeeds, and that is a long shot, government hunters in the Pampa Galeras could start a truly open season on the hapless beasts. -
* It was acceptance of a vicuna coat from Boston Industrialist Bernard Goldfine that led to the 1958 resignation of President Eisenhower's chief aide Sherman Adams, a major scandal of Ike's years.
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