Rhino poaching close to home


One of the biggest newsmakers of the year has been the scores of rhino that have been poached since poaching went high-tech. Once upon a time, poachers were barefoot, hungry people, setting makeshift snares to nab passing animals for food. You could hardly begrudge them.

The rhino poacher of today arrives in a helicopter, equipped with night vision goggles and rifles loaded with poison darts. The rhinos don’t stand a chance against this high-tech onslaught.

My aunt and uncle manage a game farm in the Karoo, and they have carried out “green hunts” on their rhinos to dehorn them and reduce the threat of poaching.

The horns were carefully tagged by nature conservation and kept in a very big safe, but after a series of troubling break-ins, the farm management took the decision to put them in a vault at the bank and publicise the fact.

It seems to strange to be storing a chunk of keratin – the stuff that fingernails are made of – in a bank vault, but with the price that rhino horn fetches on the black market, it's actually more valuable than gold.

Rhino horn isn’t actually used in some Asian countries as an aphrodisiac as is often suggested by reports, but rather as a medicine to treat a variety of ailments from rheumatism to devil possession.

Regardless of the actual use, there is no scientific evidence to back up the claims of the horn's healing properties, but the human mind is a powerful thing and so the demand for rhino horn continues.

This is all cultural and historic information and rhino poaching is a well-worn topic this year, but earlier this week, my aunt forwarded me a press release from her friends at Amakhala Game Reserve about the slaughter of their two rhino bulls - a valuable part of their breeding programme.

The release came with the gory pictures of these two massive beasts lying decaying in the Karoo sun, their poor faces hollowed out and bloody where their horns once were. I have been horrified and concerned all along about the rhino poaching, but these pictures got to me in a way that no others have.

Perhaps it’s that someone in my family knew these bulls personally. Perhaps it’s the familiarity of the landscape in which their carcasses lay. I’ve frequently given rhinos a wide berth against a similar backdrop on my aunt’s farm - one even rocked up on my wedding day there.

But more than anything, it's the sheer senselessness of the situation that makes me so angry. These animals aren't being killed by hungry people for food. They’re being slaughtered to cater to the superstitions of people a continent and an ocean away, who would be just as benefited if they chewed on their own toenails.

The limited rhino population is taking a severe blow as these high-tech criminals come down from the skies and rain darts of death on defenceless animals.

And it’s all for the money. So everyone involved - where the helicopters are landing, where the horns are being sold, processed, smuggled or whatever - has offered their silence in exchange for cash. It makes me sick, especially in light of the fact that it is thought that many of them work in conservation or animal health.

- Georgina Guedes is a freelance writer.

Well said!