The Changing Face Of Asia

The mighty land mass of Asia dwarfs all other continents, spanning thousands of miles from the North Sea to steamy jungles, including tundra, taiga, forest, desert and the world's tallest mountains, and from the Pacific to the Bosporus. Even so, when I was a youngster, hunting in Asia meant hunting in India, with most of Asia's mysteries cloaked behind the Iron Curtain. This didn't seem so terrible, because in those days a tiger hunt in India was still a relatively common adventure. I thrilled to Jim Corbett's tales of hunting maneaters and contemporary accounts by contemporary heroes, writers such as Jack O'Connor and Robert Ruark. I assumed someday I would journey to India and hunt a tiger.

This was not to be. Tigers persist in several corners of Asia, but in India the burgeoning human population has left them little room. There will be no more tiger hunting in my lifetime, nor should there be--and it isn't just the tigers that are in trouble. Asia does not approach Africa in terms of diversity of wildlife, but within living memory India surpassed Africa with her concentration of dangerous game: tiger, leopard, Asian elephant, gaur, water buffalo, one-horned rhino, sloth bear. And then there were gazelles, blackbuck, sambar, hog deer, chital, nilgai, wild boar and in the northern hills, wild sheep and goats.

As India was fading, Iran came to life. There was little dangerous game, but in the 1960s and until the Shah's government fell, Iran was the mountain hunter's paradise, with Red sheep, Armenian sheep, Urial sheep, ibex, gazelles, red deer, wild boar. By the mid-1970s Iran had become the hunting destination in Asia. O'Connor hunted there several times. My own uncle hunted there with Bill Ruger in the late 1960s. Come to think of it, I had a plan in place to hunt Iran the year of the revolution, 1979. Yep, missed that one, too. Iran is technically open again today, and the hunting is superb, but Americans are barred by sanctions from doing business there.

For many hunters the primary lure of Asia has not been tigers and other jungle game, but the diverse wild sheep and goats of her endless mountains. Early in the 19th century a few hardy explorer-hunters such as Kermit Roosevelt and St. George Littledale penetrated those marvelous mountains with magic names: Tien Shan, Karakoram, Pamir, Hindu Kush, Himalaya. However, when the Iron Curtain went up, much of Asia's wildlife lay in forbidden lands.

Sheep-hunting pioneers like the Klineburger brothers, with clients such as Herb Klein and Elgin Gates, created new interest in both Asia and mountain game. There were opportunities here and there--Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Nepal, Afghanistan (until the Russian invasion)--but the new face of Asian hunting came with the collapse of the Soviet Union. There was, and is, great habitat and healthy wildlife populations throughout much of Asia. It didn't take long for some of the new republics of the former USSR to realize wildlife had value, and in many cases hunting was their first and best opportunity for tourism.