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SOFT TOUCH: Damian Vergnaud, owner of Inverdoorn Game Reserve and Safari Lodge near Ceres, touches an adult rhino bull s horn after it was tranquillised. Some game reserve owners have have taken drastic steps for conservation and poisoned their rhinos horns to render them valueless to poachers. Picture: Matthew Jordaan
The devastating poaching onslaught on SA’s rhinos is continuing, with a record number – 448 – being killed last year.
This total includes 19 black rhinos, a critically endangered species of which fewer than 5 000 remain in the wild.
The toll is a 34 percent increase over 2010, when poachers killed 333 SA rhinos, and nearly four times the 122 lost in 2009.
Last year also saw the demise of rhinos in Vietnam, when the last Javan rhinoceros in the country was killed by poachers and its horn removed in October.
“If left unchecked, poaching gangs could put the survival of these iconic species in jeopardy,” warned Dr Colman O Criodain, wildlife-trade policy analyst for international conservation group WWF.
The group’s comments about official government statistics came the same week SANParks authorities announced that a further 11 dead rhinos had been found in the Kruger National Park.
More than half of SA’s rhino deaths have occurred in the world-famous park, with 252 last year alone.
WWF noted that SA had increased its law-enforcement efforts to curb rhino poaching, but the killing had accelerated.
“The bottom line is more rhinos than ever were poached in 2011,” O Criodain said.
Dr Morné du Plessis, chief executive of WWF-SA, said rhino poaching was being conducted by sophisticated international criminal syndicates that smuggled the horns to Asia.
“It’s not enough to bust the little guy. Investigators need to shut down the kingpins organising these criminal operations. Governments in Africa and Asia must work together across borders to stop the illegal trade.”
SA law enforcement officials made 232 poaching-related arrests in 2011, compared to 165 in 2010.
WWF noted that sentences imposed for rhino crimes had also increased in recent years, with poachers and horn smugglers receiving as long as 16 years in prison.
It pointed out the recent upsurge in rhino poaching had been linked to increased demand for rhino horn in Asia – particularly Vietnam, where it carried prestige as a luxury item, as a post-partying cleanser, and also as a purported cancer cure.
Tom Milliken, rhino trade expert of wildlife trade monitoring network Traffic (Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce), a joint programme of WWF and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, said rhino horn had gained popularity among wealthy Vietnamese elite and business people.
“(They) give it as a gift, when currying political favour, or take it as an antidote to over-indulgence. But killing endangered rhinos to mitigate a hangover is a criminal way to see in the new year.”
The group said that according to traditional Chinese medicine experts, rhino horn had no proven cancer-treating properties and, contrary to popular myth, it had never been used in traditional medicine as an aphrodisiac.
The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) has found that consumer demand in Vietnam is driving much of the rhino poaching and the convention has told Vietnam, which signed the convention in 1994, that it must show progress in curtailing illegal trade in rhino parts and derivatives.
“So far we have yet to see Vietnam respond to this ruling from Cites,” O Criodain said.
“For that matter, Cites must put pressure on Vietnam to respond meaningfully, as it has done with other countries whose compliance with the convention has been called into question.”
A bilateral treaty to ramp up law-enforcement collaboration between SA and Vietnam had been negotiated in September last year, but remained unsigned, it noted.
l According to the latest rhino statistics, there are 4 838 black rhino left and the species is classified as “critically endangered”.
Most of these animals occur in southern Africa.
In November last year, the western black rhino subspecies from West Africa, and particularly Cameroon, was declared officially extinct.
There are about 20 000 white rhino, a species that veteran SA conservationist Ian Player and colleagues saved from extinction.
They started in the 1950s, after numbers had dropped to fewer than 100 in 1900. The species is now classified as “near threatened”.
SA’s total rhino population is estimated at 1 916 black and 18 780 white.
There are three Asian species: the greater one-horned rhino, of which 2 913 remain with a “vulnerable” classification; the Javan rhino, “critically endangered”, with a population of not more than 50 animals; and the Sumatran rhino, of which fewer than 200 remain and which is also classified as “critically endangered”.
- Weekend Argus
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