Rhinos dehorned to stop poaching
SOUTH Africa has dehorned dozens of rhinos in three popular game parks, aiming to prevent armed poachers taking advantage of the post-Covid-19 crash in tourism to kill them for their horns.
The exercise in Pilanesberg National Park and the Mafikeng and Botsalano game reserves leaves the rhinos with horn stumps too small for poachers to bother with.
Nico Jacobs, helicopter pilot and founding member of non-profit Rhino 911 flew a helicopter over Pilanesberg last month with Reuters journalists. They spotted a lioness eating the carcass of a rhino that had been poached days earlier. Experts fear the absence of tourists may already have spurred a poaching spike.
They proceeded to a spot where the poachers had tranquillised a female rhino before removing her horn with an electric saw. One of her calves had to be restrained.
Working with authorities, they began dehorning three years ago. Jacobs said they had since seen a drop in poaching.
The numbers of rhinos in the parks, and how many have been poached, are kept secret to protect them.
“I’ve seen so many slaughtered, butchered rhinos. What is the solution?” he asked. “For them (poachers) to come when there are lions, elephants... It’s too much risk for that little piece,” he said.
Last week, scientists published a study showing that humans are causing mass extinction on a scale unseen since a meteor wiped out dinosaurs 65 million years ago, the sixth large-scale extinction in Earth’s history.
Rhinos have been around for 30 million years, but decades of hunting and habitat loss have reduced their numbers to about 27000 today.
A poaching surge has wiped out thousands in the past three years.
“In order to… give the population a chance to grow again, we need to relieve the pressure on them… (by) dehorning,” Pieter Nel, acting head of conservation of the North West Parks board, said.
Rhino horn sells for $60 000 (R1 million) a kilogram, more than cocaine or gold.
In East Asia, it is used in medicinal potions, despite containing the same key component as human fingernails.
THE severe economic and social disruptions caused by Covid-19 underline the need for a collective and robust national strategy to unlock entrepreneurship in South Africa, according to a new report published yesterday.
Even before the pandemic, many aspects of the entrepreneurial ecosystem needed a major overhaul, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor SA 2019/2020 report stated. The report was published by the University of Stellenbosch Business School, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor and the Small Enterprise Development Agency.
The study included a survey sample of 3 300 people.
It said the entrepreneurial ecosystem was rated one of the most challenging in the sample of participating economies in 2019 and had exhibited little sign of improvement over the past few years.
| African News Agency (ANA)