Legal horn trade considered in effort to save species

WHUUMP!… Whuump!…Two heavy slugs of flying lead slice through the thick skin of a 2-ton rhino, shattering bones, tissue and vital organs.

The animal slumps to the ground.

Long before its life blood has emptied away into the soil, a man with an axe is hacking deeply into the front of its head to rip away the two horns that once protected it from humans and other foes.

The axeman, the shooter and his assistants need to work quickly if they are to profit from these blood horns.

Though some poachers use silencers, the noise from the two heavy-calibre rifle shots normally needed to kill such a large animal will have alerted wildlife rangers, police and soldiers deployed in several wildlife reserves to curb the unrelenting slaughter of South Africa’s dwindling rhino populations.

More than 6 000 rhinos have been killed here in the past eight years, and at the current poaching rate of almost 1 200 a year, conservation experts wonder how much longer this killing rate can continue before the species is driven to extinction.

Elsewhere in Africa, rhinos have become extinct already in more than 20 countries, and as the poaching noose is drawn ever tighter around the continent’s last southern strongholds, wildlife lovers remain sharply divided on how to end the butchery.

Since 1973, it has been illegal to sell any rhino horns across international borders, yet 39 years later there is no sign that the poaching crisis is coming to an end.

If anything, it is getting worse. Despite the deployment of the army, night-time helicopter patrols, tracker dogs, thermal imagery and other interventions, the black-market price for rhino horns continues to soar.

Earlier this year, the cabinet was widely expected to put forward a controversial proposal to lift the world ban and reopen the door to the trading of old horn stockpiles and legally obtained horns to counter the black-market trade.

The South African proposal has not been abandoned entirely, but was put on ice ahead of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meeting to be held in Joburg later this month.

Now the proposal is back on the Joburg table after Swaziland put in a similar, last-minute proposal to CITES to allow an experimental “pilot project” to sell off the kingdom’s stockpiles to depress the black-market trade and also raise revenue to protect its besieged rhino reserves.

Ted Reilly, head of Big Game Parks and main author of the Swazi proposal to CITES, acknowledges that many wildlife lovers strongly oppose or feel deeply uncomfortable about reopening the legal trade in rhino horns – yet he believes it is the only way to halt the slaughter.

The 78-year-old conservationist and pioneer of Swaziland’s big game park network is a contemporary of South African rhino conservation icon Dr Ian Player.

Shortly before his death in 2014, Player also stuck his neck out to express the view that reopening a legal trade should be debated urgently as a means to slow the poaching tide.

“Everyone wanted to hit me. There was a violent reaction when I said the time had come to start talking about this (legal trading),” said in 2013.

Like Player, Reilly draws a distinction between wildlife preservation and conservation.

He argues that the preservationist approach has been a failure in countries like Kenya, where hunting and other forms of consumptive wildlife use was not allowed.

Yet in several southern African nations, which allowed hunting and the sale of wildlife products, the population of rhinos had grown rapidly over the past few decades.

“What astonishes me is that people can’t see this,” he says.