Legally acquired rhino horn at click of mouse
THERE are 32 sellers of verified, legally acquired rhino horn on a South African website, Rhino Horn Trade Africa.
The two-month-old site aims to create a marketplace to buy and sell legally harvested horn from living or naturally deceased rhinos.
The only catch is that there are no legitimate buyers.
When Johannesburg-based financial traders Warren de Klerk and Allan Thomson created the website, they knew this would be the case.
It has been legal to buy and sell rhino horn within South Africa since last year, when the Private Rhino Owners Association won a court case against the Department of Environment Affairs’ trading ban on a legal technicality. But there is a global ban on trading rhino horn so it can’t be sold to markets where there is demand, such as Vietnam and China.
One way to bypass the law is to acquire a permit to hunt a rhino in South Africa and export horn from the killed rhino.
Thomson says this exception and poaching mean that “rhino is more valuable dead than alive”.
The purpose of the website, which was launched in March, is to change that.
The website and its DNA testing systems are primarily to show the global community, which bans rhino horn trade, that horn can be legally harvested and sold.
Rhino horn is a renewable resource and can be removed by reserve owners from rhino every 18 months, while the rhino stays alive.
Horn is made of keratin, the substance in fingernails, and removing it is viewed much like cutting fingernails. The website is more than an online marketplace, said Thomson.
It has been set up in compliance with the National Environmental Management and Biodiversity Act and TOPS, the Threatened or Protected Species Act.
Sellers of horn need to have permits to keep rhino, they need an environment official present when the horn is removed, and sellers and buyers will be subject to Fica, or financial laws.
The DNA from the rhino and its horn to be sold is taken and kept on a database managed by Onderstepoort Veterinary School at the University of Pretoria.