The holocaust of the African rhinoceros is accelerating, with the very real possibility that both the continent's species -- white and black rhinos -- could be extinct outside zoos in a matter of years. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were several hundred thousand rhinos in East and southern Africa. European settlers described the bush immediately outside Nairobi as stiff with black rhino.
Today, there are perhaps 5,000 black rhinos and 20,000 white rhinos left on the continent, but even these numbers must be considered optimistic; the killing has reached such a frenzied pitch that the only thing that's certain is that the populations are in free-fall.
The root causes for the slaughter remain the same -- demand for rhino horn in traditional Asian medicine, and to a lesser degree, the use of the horns for handles on heirloom-quality Yemeni daggers. But one big thing has changed: Asia has money now. Formerly impoverished factory workers and farmers are, by the metrics of the past, rich. Many can afford to buy rhino horn, even at the currently stratospheric price of $66,000 a kilo. Supposedly, interest in the horn is slackening in China and picking up in Vietnam; but by any measure, the demand continues to climb.
What to do? Right now, hand-wringing seems the fashion. Animal rights and conservation groups have sounded the tocsin as usual, pleading for still more money to "save the rhino." But you can't find enough donor money to counter the cartel-scale financing that's driving the slaughter. Poachers suborn game scouts and rangers, who provide specific details on the location of the animals; kills are made from helicopters with muffled blades. In the face of such industrial poaching, a few more rehabilitation centers for orphaned rhino calves, a few more scouts patrolling the reserves, aren't going to make a whit of difference. Nor will the tears of the myriad celebrities and animal lovers who dote on large, charismatic mammals, rhinos included.
Some people who actually work with rhinos on a daily basis, though, have a pretty good idea: sell horn from farmed rhinos through a legal and regulated market. Horns can be detached from tranquilized rhinos quickly, safely, and painlessly. This does two things: removes the poachers' incentives for killing rhinos, and provides an extremely valuable product which can be sold to aid rhino conservation (Right now, of course, the sale of rhino horn is barred by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species; a variance in the CITES proscription will be necessary to allow legal trade.)
Rhinos are easily raised and bred in captivity, and their populations can be expanded relatively rapidly for introduction into the wild. Today, such endeavors are fruitless -- the rhinos are killed almost as fast as they're released. The dynamic must change at a very basic level, and this will require some deep and painful soul-searching on the part of conservationists. John Hume, the owner of the Mauricedale Game Ranch in South Africa, is the largest private rhino breeder in the country, and few if any people have a better grasp on this issue. He and his staffers observe there is a compelling precedent for changing the rules for rhinos: vicuña.
These wild relatives of the llama were hunted almost to extinction for their ultra-fine wool, which was -- and remains -- much in demand for luxury garments. From an estimated pre-European contact population of two million animals, vicuña had fallen to about 6,000 when they were first accorded some protection in the mid-1960s. They were listed under CITES in 1975, and all trade in vicuña products halted. Poaching, however, remained rampant, and the future looked bleak -- well, non-existent -- for this wild South American camelid.
In 1979, however, a conservation agreement was signed by Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Ecuador, and work began on several fronts -- including the private sector. Most dramatically, Grupo Inca, a Peruvian textile manufacturer, began the "Shear a Vicuña, Save a Vicuña" campaign -- the idea being, of course, that you can remove a vicuña's wool without killing the animal. Several couture houses jumped on the bandwagon, including Loro Piana, which actively solicited local communities for sheared vicuña wool.
Today, more than 30 years later, vicuñas number close to 350,000. CITES has lifted its ban on vicuña products from Chile and Peru. Haut couturiers have plenty of vicuña wool for their creations. And local farmers and pastoralists, who once poached the animals relentlessly, now utilize them for a sustainable income. Animals are captured, sheared, and returned to the wild
It may seem vicuña and rhinos are apples and oranges, but their situations are analogous. Both species yield products much in demand. In both cases, these products can be obtained without killing the animals. And the people who share the land with both species are the key players in the animals' survival. Rhinos are not being wiped out in Africa because African pastoralists and petty officials are inordinately cruel. Rhinos are being killed because rural Africans are poor. Participation in a single rhino hunt can mean the difference between starvation and a modest degree of prosperity. The needs of rural communities must be taken into account if the rhino is to survive. That doesn't mean hand-outs -- it means incentives that make living rhinos valuable to local farmers, herders, and bureaucrats.
Similarly, private rhino breeders have the expertise and means to expand rhino numbers. They will do just that if they have the appropriate stimulus, i.e., profit. Private enterprise doesn't always create a virtuous circle, but in this case it can: the rhino, rural communities, conservation NGOs and rhino breeders would all benefit. When there is plenty of rhino horn on the market, prices will fall, the incentives to kill rhinos will diminish, and the number of rhinos in the wild will increase.
Resistance to this idea will be reflexive. And yes, there is something repugnant about commodifying the African rhino. But we can't afford normative thinking -- yearning for what "should" be because it's "right." Things are what they are - and for the rhino, the situation is at DefCon One. Everything that has been tried to this point has failed miserably. We need a new plan.
Proposals asserting that legitimising rhino horn trade - even from animals that die naturally - will bring the economic resources needed to support improved rhino protection, are based on a total misread of the consequences of trading wildlife products with Asia.
Whatever Africa produces from whatever managed scheme, will never meet the potential demand. This will, inevitably, continue to be met through poaching. Legitimising trade will make it easier to infiltrate illegal rhino horn into any legal process, make a handful of rhino owners very wealthy, incentivise poaching and drive deluded consumers, hoping for a miracle cure, to despair.
There are solutions. The rhino is not without hope. Education, robust protection, improved law-enforcement, effective sentencing, better equipment and, above all, clear policy (a resolute end to all trade including trophy hunting), if delivered with commitment and determination, will work.
Legalising trade, as advocated by Glen Martin, is the counsel of the madhouse, advocated by those who place monetary gain above conservation and economics before survival. As they say: there is enough in the world to meet the needs of all men but not enough in the world to satisfy the greed on one man.
Will Travers OBE
CEO Born Free USA
www.bornfreeusa.org
The solutions you propose, although necessary aspects of any future rhino conservation plan, have been tried here in Africa for years. This approach has all but failed in Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland and Mozambique. South Africa and Namibia are the only countries with significant populations of rhino left and you propose we simply follow more of the same attempts?
What about the practicalities - who is going to pay? Conservation doesn't pay for itself and eco-tourism simply doesn't cover the costs. How are any of your policies going to assist our impoverished communities? If anything, it is only going to further their marginalization, leading to greater poaching levels.
Your organization is calling for children to sign a petition against ivory trade. The ivory trade is composed of multi-faceted political, socio-economic and conservation-oriented aspects that require intensive analysis before decisions are made. It is a violent and brutal situation that stirs emotional and heated debates. If you were truly committed to conservation practices, you would be over here, working with African communities that live in elephant range states - I'm sure their children would have a different view of elephants to the ones you are campaigning. And you accuse others of placing monetary gain and economics above conservation and survival?
You say that eco-tourism doesn't cover the costs of conservation. Kenya's tourism industry (non-consumptive wildlife-based) generates more than a billion US$ for the Kenya exchequer, employs 160,000 people, costs about $50 million a year, the annual budget of the Kenya Wildlife Service, under whose stewardship elephant and rhino numbers have doubled in the last 20 years to around 35,000 and 650 today respectively.
The problem with advocating trade is that it will never suffice. Leading advocates of rhino horn trade estimate that South Africa could produce around 3,000 kg of rhino horn annually. This will produce around 1,500,000 two gram 'doses' for spurious medicinal use. With 400 million middle-class Chinese consumers and their disposable income, this will increase, not satisfy, demand and incentivise poaching. It simply doesn't work like that (as limited legal ivory sales have proved).
Yes, I am calling for children (and people of any age) to sign Born Free USA's petition against the ivory trade. We will do whatever we can to end trade that threatens the survival of species. I just don't believe, based on 48 years experience in Africa, that trading rhino horn or ivory will help achieve that objective. Will
Karl Ammann
Their income (when they are not selling horns to the illegal trade) is derived from trading with each other and selling animals for trophy hunts.
Please don't forget that my tame, dehorned, supplementary fed rhino running free in camps of about 400 ha each(about 50000 sq meters per rhino) can within a short period of time become wild horned rhinos running in your wilderness areas and National Game Reserves.
Without selling the horn this comes at an enormous cost and I certainly will not be able to continue indefinitely or persuade anyone else to breed rhino. I am not prepared to sell my rhino males to the trophy hunters and without selling the horn I must still buy them a new farm every year to keep them alive, where is the logic?
They don't do anything for conservation of rhino in the wild except trade amongst each other for trophy hunting purposes and increasing their horn-stockpiles.
My comment to jekyllandhyde: "Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people"- Elanour Rooseveldt.