LUCY VIGNE: Conservation

Stop pseudo-hunters from buying ‘trophy’ rhino horns

Published:2011/11/10 07:10:54 AM

THE trophy-hunting industry in SA needs to stop allowing east Asian pseudo-hunters from acquiring rhino horn under the guise of trophies. They have been collecting them for commercial purpose and that is illegal.

The numbers of Asian "trophy" hunters has been rising; they have been pushing up the price for hunting rhinos for their horns, causing spiralling rhino poaching in SA. From 2000 to 2007, a mere 15 rhinos were poached annually. In 2008, the figure was 83, and this doubled in 2009 and then doubled again to 333 last year.

The latest figure from SANParks is more than 341 for this year so far.

The market demand for rhino horn is growing in east Asia: prices for it reach $20000/kg retail for African horn in Vietnam, for example. Illegal rhino horn has made a comeback in traditional Chinese medicine to reduce fever and as a tonic — not to be consumed as an aphrodisiac, as western journalists so often misunderstand.

We all know the need for improved antipoaching measures with adequate funding, stricter law enforcement, effective intelligence gathering, greater penalties, and the arrest and conviction of traders and poachers. We all know the importance of education on rhino conservation, the need to understand and reduce consumer demand for rhino horn to bring down its price, and the need to encourage pharmacists in Asia to prescribe substitutes for rhino horn.

We know these measures always require strengthening to keep abreast of the poaching and the illegal rhino-horn trade.

Thanks to these efforts, SA is to be admired that its rhino numbers are still rising — the country is home to the largest population of rhinos by far in Africa: 1916 black rhino and 18780 white rhino. With the recent surge in rhino poaching, the government again must be congratulated for tightening law enforcement.

Yet it has clearly not been enough. Rhino poaching is out of control, and rhinos are often gruesomely killed, their horns sometimes hacked off while the animal is still alive, bleeding to death slowly and in agony.

The government recognises that so-called sport hunters from east Asia who use legal trophy hunts as a way to get horn to trade must be stopped. From 1972 to 2004, an average of 36 white rhinos were hunted on licence a year, costing the client about $32000 a rhino hunt. From 2005 to 2008, the number doubled to 86 white rhino a year and reached 100 by 2009. By then, 90% of the clients were Asian compared with 15% in 2005. The traditional hunters from the US and Europe had been driven out as east Asians were prepared to pay three times more for their quarry. Rather than pay the usual upfront trophy fee and daily rates, Asians have the horns weighed and pay the professional hunter per kilogram.

To try to control this trophy hunting, there is now a limit to one rhino per person, but some even more dubious east Asian rhino- horn traders have circumvented this by bringing Thai prostitutes to hunts and receiving licences through them to export so- called trophy horns.

It is a scam; it is encouraging poaching; and the licences given to Asians are also, we think, acting as a mask for illegally poached rhino horns in SA and neighbouring countries, such as Zimbabwe, being taken back to Asia. The increased availability and consumption of illegal rhino horn in east Asia is putting huge pressure on Africa’s rhinos, both the black and the white species.

It is understandable why owners of rhinos in SA want to sell hunting licences to east Asians as they are willing to pay more for them, driving up the price. But the hunting industry has inadvertently been encouraging an increased demand for rhino horn in east Asia by increasing the availability of rhino horn and whetting appetites for it.

The international trade in rhino products is banned worldwide to members of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites), and it will be some time before the international trade ban will be lifted, especially now. SA has, however, sold more than 140 rhinos to China over the past decade, where the Chinese are farming them, some say, in the hope that domestic trade in their products might become legal.

The growing wealth in much of east Asia has enabled more people to buy rhino horn who wish to show off that they can afford it. The Chinese were also buying old rhino horns at extortionate prices on public auction in the UK last year and taking them back to China with Cites papers (being old horns), but this has now been stopped as it has been realis ed the horns are being used for trade.

With the price for rhino horn higher than ever, even rhino horns in museums in Europe have been looted.

Antique carved cups made of rhino horn are selling to Chinese in Hong Kong for much higher prices in the past five years.

In Vietnam, too, a great prestige value has developed for the horn among the nouveau riche. And the idea in Vietnam that rhino horn has helped cure cancer (although this is not recognised by traditional Vietnamese or Chinese pharmacists) has fuelled demand in even further. Vietnam has even lost to poachers the last of its own lesser one-horned rhinos (officially stated in October) — this is the most endangered of the world’s five rhino species and there are only about 44 left, all in Java. It is a travesty.

The growing demand for South African rhino horn by certain Vietnamese, Chinese and Thais is bringing shame to the majority of their fellow law-abiding citizens. Even Vietnamese diplomats are involved, as filmed in SA for a TV documentary. It has also become a shocking embarrassment for SA that crooked professional hunters, helicopter pilots and even certain vets in the country have been colluding with east Asians to provide them with rhino horns.

Traditional US and European hunters need to be invited back to hunt rhinos for their mounted trophies at lower prices, instead of east Asians, who are not sport hunters. This will reduce the cost of rhinos that the government sells to private ranches in SA and reduce the profitability to the rhino owners back to realistic figures. In turn, the fast-rising costs of antipoaching operations will settle once more and east Asians’ free-for- all raid on SA’s rhinos will be stopped.

Vigne is a wildlife researcher in Kenya.