Bob Dole, seal savior.

By pushing his favorite pill, the former senator may be doing more to protect wildlife than he ever did as a public servant.

How so? A new study shows that when men start popping Viagra instead of traditional potency pills made of seal penises and such (for real!), the demand for those animals goes down.

So to speak.

“As a consequence of Viagra’s popularity,” write professors Frank and William von Hippel – brothers – “certain species may soon enjoy a significant improvement in their conservation status.”

To test their theory, the brothers looked at sales figures for reindeer antler velvet and seal privates – both used as libido boosters in traditional Chinese medicine – before and after the advent of Viagra in 1998.

Sure enough, Alaskan antler sales fell 72 percent the year Viagra appeared. And the price of Canadian hooded and harp seals’ doohickeys dropped from $70 to $100 per unit to just $15 to $20 today. There are, according to one report, freezers full of the things, and they just aren’t moving.

Uh. Yes. Anyway. So Viagra gets the seal seal of approval, and Rudolph once again can concentrate on his sleigh-navigation duties.

Unfortunately, the von Hippels could not study Viagra’s impact on any truly endangered species because trafficking in these animals is illegal, so no one is keeping sales records. But Joshua Ginsberg of the Wildlife Conservation Society :quot; i.e., the Bronx Zoo – believes, “There are a variety of endangered species that could benefit (from the drug’s popularity).”

Turtle eggs, hyena lips, gorilla genitalia – perhaps one day Pfizer’s phenom will replace them all as perker-uppers. Let’s hope. But as Ginsberg also points out, traditional medicine deals not only with erectile dysfunction. It deals with every health issue, from headaches to hair loss to herpes. And those illnesses are still often treated with potions made from species that are poached.

That’s why the conservation society has unveiled a Web site for students of traditional Chinese medicine – in Chinese – introducing them to the idea of conserving wildlife.

“When we told them that tigers and rhinos and the antelope from Central Asia were all endangered because of their use in traditional Chinese medicine, they were astonished. They had no idea,” Ginsberg says.

The organization also is trying to get Chinese medical textbooks to include a chapter on nonanimal-based alternatives to traditional therapies. “My favorite example is that tiger bone is used as a cure for rheumatoid arthritis (in traditional Chinese medicine), but there’s another natural product derived from the willow tree that has a similar effect,” Ginsberg says. “It’s called aspirin.”

Viagra alone, then, may not save the world. But it does seem to be saving some seals. And Dole’s career. And as an example of an alternative to alternative medicine, it scores.