Right after sao la (Pseudoryx nghetinhensis) was discovered in Vietnam in May 1992, a lot of programs and projects have been drawn up to protect the rare and precious animals.
The discovery of sao la in Vietnam in 1992 was the breaking news to scientists, who believed that there had been no more undiscovered big animals living in the wild since 1936.
Therefore, the discovery gave them high hope that there might be other species in the wild which have not been discovered yet. This also gave more strength to the community to continue the conservation work to protect the values of biodiversity not only for Vietnam, but for the world as well.
A lot of conservation projects have been kicked off after the discovery. Meanwhile, the Vu Quang National Park in Ha Tinh province, Pu Mat in Nghe An and the Sao la Sanctuary in Thua Thien-Hue have also been established to store the values of the biodiversity.
However, despite the efforts to protect wild animals, the population of sao la has been decreasing over the last two decades. There has been very rare information about the appearance of sao la in the wild. Especially, some scientists have predicted that sao la has been on the verge of extinction or have disappeared for ever.
Reports showed that of the over 100 million dollars foreign institutions have committed to preserve wild animals, in 1990s, the budget for sao la conservation accounted for a big proportion.
These included the Netherlands funded project (2.47 million dollars, 1996-2000), implemented by WWF in Vu Quang National Park, and the project implemented in Pu Mat National Park funded by the EC (17 million euro, 1996-2001).
The biggest benefits brought by the projects are the opportunity to improve the qualification of the officers of the Vu Quang and Pu Mat national parks, upgrade the infrastructure and the equipment that serve the conservation. Especially, the image of sao la has made Vu Quang and Pu Mat parks better known to everybody.
However, a question has been raised that why the big projects still cannot help conserve sao la.
Some research works about sao la have pointed out that the key lies in the benefit sharing in sao la preservation in particular and wild animals in general.
There have been two knowledge systems existing relating to sao la, including the scientific knowledge and local people’s knowledge. It’s obvious that scientific knowledge has been enriched from people’s knowledge. However, the local people’s knowledge has always been considered as having minor importance. This has led to the unreasonable benefit sharing mechanism among involved parties in the conservation process.
Though people make a great contribution to the forming up of the huge fund of knowledge about sao la, they have been better known as the subjects that cause disasters to sao la.
Governments, local authorities and environmentalists all have called on to protect wild animals. A lot of national parks and sanctuaries have been set up to implement conservation projects, thus restricting the local people’s opportunities to access the forest natural resources, forcing them to give up cultivation or hunting.
In other words, the conservation projects do not benefit people, or even bring big difficulties to local people. That explains why people remain uncooperative in the projects.
Sao la remains an unknown to Vietnamese and international scientists over the last 20 years. All scientists have affirmed that sao la still exists in a wild, but no one has said he can see sao lao in a wild, and none receives information from local people that sao la still exists.