- BEIJING (Agence France Presse)
- China on Thursday announced its firm opposition to tourist safaris aimed
at capturing the yeti, the abominable snowman of legend said to roam China's
central mountain regions.
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- "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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- The fiery debate has not been entirely extinguished in
China.
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- 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."
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- http://www.insidechina.com/china/news/06.html
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