Fighting chance or rhino death sentence?
Reserve owners envision a market for horns and want Cites to lift its ban on trade, writes PERICLES ANETOS
JOHN Hume is quiet as he gazes from his bakkie at the large herd of rhinos descending to a feeding area on his 8,000ha property in the North West. After he chides a few stragglers, the man who bred close to 1,000 rhinos says that he is more worried than proud.
The former resort owner protects the species that has horns worth more than their weight in gold. He regards rhinos as nature’s underdogs, with a better chance of going extinct than proliferating.
He bought a white rhino along with other animals when he retired to his game farm in 1993. After getting to know his rhino, he decided to support them.
“I have a very fatal flaw in my personality: I always back the underdog. So, I never back [Novak] Djokovic and I often back Murray [in tennis]. Rhinos are likely to be losers, but that did not stop me from giving them more and more,” Hume says.
But the cost of running the operation is millions of rand a year, which Hume says he can’t afford much longer.
A proposal from Swaziland to the 17th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites) may crack a window open for Hume and 330 other private rhino owners.
The Cites meeting, taking place in Johannesburg, banned the trade in rhino horn 40 years ago, but that has not reduced illicit hunting, which spiked in SA in 2008. This year, 702 rhino were poached in the country in January-July, down from 796 a year earlier, according to the Department of Environmental Affairs.
Swaziland’s proposal, if passed by Cites, would allow the country a limited and regulated legal trade in white rhino horn. Swaziland and SA’s white rhino populations are listed in Appendix II of the convention — a list of animals that are not threatened with extinction, but may become so unless trade in specimens is subject to strict regulation. This does not prohibit SA from sending rhinos to other countries for conservation purposes.
The proposal was made by the Reilly family, who, with support from Swaziland’s royal family, pioneered the establishment of the kingdom’s protected areas. Ted Reilly and his wife, Liz, believe that selling rhino horn can fund the escalating costs of protecting rhinos and the costs of conservation in the kingdom.
Hume agrees, saying he worries about the escalating cost of protecting his rhinos and their horns.
The illegal trade in rhino horn has an estimated value of $20bn a year, according to Cites. It can fetch as much as $60,000 a kilogram on the black market, according to some estimates.
Hume and Ted Reilly believe that systems established in parks and reserves favour poachers.
“We have handed the monopoly to the poachers on a plate; we have handed them all the trade,” says Hume.
He and other private rhino owners dehorn their animals. On average, this yields 700g of horn a year from a female and 1.5kg a year from a male. However, dehorned rhinos have also been poached.
The Reillys believe that by dehorning a small portion of Swaziland’s rhino population and selling the stockpile of horn, they could yield up to $600,000 a year. Coupled with sales of horn from natural deaths and harvesting, they could generate $1.2m a year. The money could be invested in a conservation endowment. THE
JSE has been approached by private rhino owners about the possibility of trading rhino horn. Its director of commodities and key clients, Chris Sturgess, says the JSE has not conducted a detailed assessment of the product and would need the support of the Financial Services Board. The government would also need to confirm support for the trade.
Jane Wiltshire of Rhinoalive says if the trade is legalised, it could follow the path of prohibition in the 1920s and 1930s in the US. She believes that if the market is offered a legal alternative, it will migrate to that. An example of this is crocodile skin farming, which was legalised in 1979.
Wiltshire says in two decades, the trade of crocodile skin moved from being supplied by illegal poachers to being almost entirely supplied by captive-bred and ranched crocodiles — only 10% of the trade during the period came from poaching.
She says the rhino horn trade could work through a central trading organisation model. An auction process could be designed to benefit rhino owners. Price regulation would be integral and should be similar to the way that De Beers controls the price of diamonds.
The South African government and private owners have a couple of million tons of horn that could be sold to preapproved buyers, Wiltshire says.
There is speculation that some buyers are not purchasing horn for medicinal or ornamental purposes, but stockpiling it as a commodity. There would need to be mechanisms to ensure that illegal horn does not enter the legal market.
SA has advantages over other countries because it has established rhino-breeding programmes, she says.
Legal trade would not eradicate poaching, but it would reduce it drastically, Wiltshire says.
She says she believes legal trade could result in a huge spike in poaching over a short period, as poachers would want to cash in on illegal trade before it is limited.
But the Cites secretariat has already recommended along with other organisations including the World Wildlife Fund and wildlife trade monitoring network Traffic that the Swaziland proposal be rejected.
Humane Society International urged Swaziland to withdraw the proposal. KATHERINE
Johnston of Save the Rhino International says it is unclear whether legalising the trade will enable the market to be controlled. Traffic says the proposal lacks sufficient detail on mechanisms for regulating the trade, and how trading partners will be identified.
It is also unclear how the trade will affect rhino populations elsewhere in the world. A 2015 Cites report estimates there are 20,000 white rhinos and 5,000 black rhinos in 11 African countries. Asian rhinos have been decimated, with only about 3,500 greater one-horned rhinos left in the wild, less than 100 Sumatran rhinos and only 63 Javan rhinos. Bittu Sahgal, editor of Sanctuary Asia, India’s leading wildlife and nature conservation magazine, says legalising the trade will be the undoing of rhinos. The years of work on consumer awareness in East Asia will come unstuck and the demand for rhino horn will rise.
Sahgal believes that the legalisation of the trade in Swaziland will further jeopardise rhino populations in other countries including India.
“Essentially, the chimera of ‘sustainable balance’ between supply and demand is just that ... a chimera that exists only in the imagination of the people articulating the illogical case of trade,” Sahgal says.
The reasons for the current approach not working are the sophistication of poaching syndicates, the power of money and the inadequacy of real, on-the-ground protection. Legalising the trade would be the equivalent of pouring petrol on a fire to put it out.
Systems that have been established in parks and reserves favour poachers. We have handed the monopoly to the poachers on a plate; we have handed them all the trade