Vietnamese horn craze endangering rhinos
Does it cure cancer? Many in South Asian country believe it does, pushing demand to ‘dire situation’
HANOI, VIETNAM— Nguyen Huong Giang loves to party but loathes hangovers, so she ends her whiskey benders by tossing back shots of rhino horn ground with water on a special ceramic plate.
Her father gave her the 10-centimetre brown horn as a gift, claiming it cures everything from headaches to cancer. Vietnam has become so obsessed with the fingernail-like substance it now sells for more than cocaine.
“I don’t know how much it costs,” said Giang, 24, after showing off the horn in her highrise apartment overlooking the capital, Hanoi. “I only know it’s expensive.”
Experts say Vietnam’s surging demand is threatening to wipe out the world’s remaining rhinoceros populations, which recovered from the brink of extinction after the 1970s thanks to conservation campaigns. Illegal killings in Africa hit the highest recorded level in 2011 and are expected to worsen this year.
This week South Africa called for renewed cooperation with Vietnam after a “shocking number” of rhinos have already been reported dead this year.
China has long valued rhino horn for its purported — though unproven — medicinal properties, but U.S. officials and international wildlife experts now say Vietnam’s recent intense craving, blamed partly on a widespread rumour that rhino horn cures cancer, is putting unprecedented pressure on the world’s estimated 28,000 remaining animals, mainly in South Africa.
“It’s a very dire situation,” U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service director Dan Ashe said by telephone. “We have very little cushion for these populations in the wild.” Although data on the global rhino horn trade is scarce, poaching in Africa has soared in the past two years, with American officials say- ing China and Vietnam are driving the trade that has no “significant” end market in the United States. Wildlife advocates say that over the last decade, rhino horn has become a must-have luxury item for some Vietnamese nouveau riche, alongside Gucci bags and expensive Maybach cars.
Between 2006 and 2008, three diplomats at the Vietnamese Embassy in Pretoria were linked to embarrassing rhino trafficking scandals.
“There are still horns going into China but Vietnam is driving the increase in poaching for horns,” said Chris R. Shepherd, deputy regional director for Southeast Asia at the wildlife advocacy group TRAFFIC. “Vietnamese authorities really need to step up their efforts to find out who is behind horn trafficking . . . and put them out of business.”
The rhino horn craze offers bigger payoffs than other exotic wildlife products such as bear bile or tiger bone paste. American officials say the crushed powder fetches up to $55,000 (U.S.) per kilogram in Asia ($25,000 per pound) — a price that can top the U.S. street value of cocaine, making the hoof-like substance literally as valuable as gold.