Dalai Lama and Otters

The ups and downs of the fur trade have been with us for about 400 years. So it's nice when a jaded historian can demonstrate, merely by quoting others, how an action in one part of the world causes a crash in fur prices in the other, and betters my chances of seeing otters.

We begin in Tibet:

http://www.phayul.com/news/article.aspx?article=Consolidating+a+%27mini-revolution%27&id=16633
Tuesday, May 29, 2007 09:40
TibetInfoNet
As part of a campaign he launched in April 2005 in collaboration with Care for the Wild International (CWI) and the Wildlife Trust of India (WTI), the Dalai Lama, in January 2006, issued an emotional message exhorting Tibetans to stop wearing fur products or skins from endangered wildlife. Despite the exiled leader’s total absence from the state-controlled media, the message, couched in a mixture of environmental and Buddhist terminology, swiftly reached the Tibetan masses within Tibet and resulted in a success whose speed and thoroughness is unprecedented in nature protection. Beginning in Rebkong (Amdo), bonfires were lit throughout Tibet, burning the skins of endangered animals in their tens of thousands. More than a year after these dramatic events, Tibet is still virtually free from clothing made from, or trimmed with, wildlife products. Two major Tibetan festive seasons, the summer horse festivals in 2006 and the New Year celebrations (Tib: Losar), held in late February 2007, which have traditionally been the main events where Tibetans dressed in animal skins, have passed with an almost total absence of people wearing fur confirming the lasting impact of the campaign. This ‘mini-revolution’ has had an unforeseen side effect in that it has also invigorated the Tibetan fashion industry and has led to financial benefits for Tibetans, and is making significant contributions towards badly needed funding for education and economic development. Many Tibetans are confident, the horse festivals in Summer 2007 will show the durability of the trend. Meanwhile, environmentalists have emphasised the importance of making the Dalai Lama’s initiatives on environmental and animal protection sustainable by placing them in a wider, non-political context.
Tibetans like to dress ostentatiously and New Year is an opportunity to flaunt one's wealth through dress and jewellery. Prior to the Dalai Lama's anti-fur speech, no festival occasion would be celebrated without young men and women draping themselves in the skins of endangered animals such as tigers, leopards and otters. However, during the New Year celebrations in 2007, such skins were nowhere to be seen. Tibetans still wore traditional dress - bright and colourful shirts and sashes, coral and turquoise necklaces, huge yak-hide belts with large silver studs and daggers sheathed in silver encrusted with pieces of semi-precious stones. And on close examination of their clothing, one could still see the traces of fur-trim in the form of fading marks or loose, exposed and now functionless threads, but no one yearned for the fur skins that only a year ago had been symbols of wealth and prestige....

Now, we move to North America:

http://www.nafa.ca/page.asp?/trapper/shipping/index.asp
Special Notice Regarding the Otter MarketHerman Jansen reports that the problem between the Dalai Lama and the Chinese government still exists and therefore Otter skins are not selling. People are reporting that it is not a matter of price, but that the Tibetans, who are the major consumers of these skins, are not willing to buy. NAFA will therefore have to re-establish new markets for these skins, a process which normally tends to take two years.
We would recommend that all of our trappers limit their Otter harvest, as prices most likely will be reduced over last years prices by more than half and maybe as much as two-thirds. It is NAFAs intention to sell all the trapper Otters in the February 2007 auction at no limits, to establish a new market. Please be assured that NAFA will do everything within its power to generate the maximum amount of activity for this important article.

This is what this means for me. I saw these otters with a month left in the four month long trapping season in a heavily trapped swamp. May they dance forever: