THE DILEMMA OF HORNS
Private rhino owners believe that by legally selling the animals’ horns they will bring prices down. This, they argue, will cripple poaching by reducing its financial rewards. Many conservationists disagree
The online rhino horn auction that ended last Friday, believed to be the first of its kind, has some conservationists worried it will create a surge in demand that will result in further degradation of rhino populations in Africa.
John Hume, who has more than 1,500 rhinos at his wildlife ranch in North West, put 264 rhino horns up for sale from his stockpile. These horns had been humanely removed from his rhino, a tactic adopted to protect them from poachers.
For the auction to go ahead, Hume had to win a series of court battles earlier this year to overturn the eight-year-old moratorium on the domestic sale of rhino horns. Seemingly it was not as fruitful as Hume would have wanted. In a statement his attorney indicated that the auction had yielded fewer bidders and fewer sales than anticipated, but added that the “legal domestic trade has now been re-established and the road has been paved for future sales.”
Which is what Joseph Okori, the Southern Africa Director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare and others in his field are worried about. Okori says more private rhino horn owners could now feel justified in doing the same thing as Hume.
Private rhino owners who are in favour of the sale of horn believe that supplying the market with legal horn would undercut poachers, who sell it for astronomical prices. This, argue the private owners, would cripple the poachers’ operations.
Under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, which SA is a party to, the commercial trade of rhino horn is banned. The convention does allow for noncommercial trade, which means a horn can be transported internationally, but the person who buys the horn is not allowed to resell it and it must be kept whole, among other requirements. However, once horns enter another country it is up to the regulations and monitoring systems of that country to ensure the horns don’t disappear into the black market.
Hume’s auction was open to bidders from China‚ Vietnam and elsewhere.
Okori says if more legal horn goes on the market not only in SA but in Vietnam and China it would create a niche for people who, in the past, could not afford rhino horn being sold by black-market dealers. “Not only are you increasing the market base in countries that consume the horn but you will make it more affordable, which means the demand for rhino horn is going to go up,” he says.
Okori says the risk is that if demand increases as more people buy rhino horn and legal trade fails to meet the demand, poaching will spike. Countries with smaller populations of wild rhino will be hardest-hit as they don’t have the resources to defend their herds.
He says lower prices will mean more people will want rhino horn and be able to afford it. “People who would have never thought of having rhino horn could say, let me give it a try because now it is affordable.”
In Hume’s statement his attorney said the fact few bidders were willing to sign up for the auction could “only be attributed to the unlawful delay in handing over the auction permit and the consequential limited time of less than two days for bidders to register.”
Private Rhino Owners Association chair Pelham Jones called the sale a success as it proved there was a local demand for horn. He said the auction showed there was strong international interest in legal horn.
Jones said that despite the efforts of the SA government and other African governments, poaching remains a problem.
He cited the end of prohibition in the US as a prime example of how the legalising of a substance can result in reduction and collapse of the illegal market.
“None of us ever got into rhino conservation because we ultimately wanted to be involved in the rhino horn trade. We did it for rhino conservation purposes,” he said.
The auction, he added, showed that it was possible to turn a worthless stockpile of rhino horn into “conservation revenue”.
The World Wide Fund for Nature said it was concerned about the implications of the lifting of the moratorium on domestic trade in rhino horn. It noted that while domestic trade was now technically legal within SA, it was illogical to have a national market for rhino horn without legal access to consumers in Asia.
Okori says this legal auction has, to some extent, negated an information war that has been waged in countries such as China and Vietnam.
Campaigns featuring celebrities, including Jackie Chan and Sir Richard Branson, were aimed at dissuading consumers from buying products made from rhino horn.
Okori says the auction sent the opposite message to people in countries that consume rhino horn.
“The signal [to rhino horn consumers] is that the international community recognises, by the fact the [auction] went ahead, the significance of rhino horn in China and Vietnam, which is counterproductive to the measures being taken at international level. We are stabbing ourselves in the back.”