Rhino horn trade - yes or no

Why did rhino poaching flare up so suddenly in South Africa just over a decade ago? The answer to this question may provide some useful clues while searching for solutions to douse, or at least dampen, the recent poaching inferno that has swept over Southern Africa and extinguished the lives of close to ten thousand of these iconic animals. Rhino poaching is not new of course. For centuries, hunters and horn poachers of all hues have been slaughtering them across Africa and Asia – some to hang on the walls of lounges and trophy rooms, some to be carved into dagger handles or kept as status symbols, or simply crushed up for use in traditional Chinese medical potions.

Yet there was a critical point – in 2008 – when horn poaching literally exploded in South Africa – the last, large bastion of global rhino conservation.

Whoosh! It was almost as if a match had been tossed over a petrol-soaked land to ignite a massive bush fire that would spread out to engulf just about every piece of land in South Africa where rhinos had thrived for several decades in relative safety, in stark contrast to rhino populations in most other parts of Africa.

Thirteen years later that fire is still roaring, despite the Dollar fortune spent to quell the problem. It has fostered the inevitable militarisation of state and private nature reserves – in turn fuelling perceptions in some quarters that rhino conservation outweighs the social welfare of nearby poor communities.

The skeleton of a poached rhino, note the section of the skull where the horn was hacked off

What triggered the fire?

What happened between 2007 and 2008 that could help to explain the sudden inferno?

Was it simply a case of coincidence, or circumstances in which the availability of rhino horns elsewhere in Africa had been virtually exhausted due to poaching? Was there a sudden surge in demand for rhino horn that was triggered by an explosion of wealth in China and Vietnam?

Or, was it that in June 2007, new regulations came into effect to restrict the hunting of rhinos for horn trophies? Or that on June 12, 2008, former Environment Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk notified the wildlife industry that government would shortly impose a moratorium on the domestic trade in rhino horns?

(Though rhino horn trading has been banned at an international level since 1977, it was still legal to buy and sell rhino horns in South Africa until 2008 – even though there is no direct consumer use for horns in this country).

According to court papers filed on behalf of the former minister, significant volumes of rhino horns previously traded on the domestic market were being sold clandestinely and then moved to Asia. In other words, legal domestic trade was supplying the illegal international trade.

Soon after the moratorium came into effect in early 2009, the government introduced further measures to make it more difficult to obtain horns from “pseudo hunting”. (Sham hunts in which professional hunters shot animals on behalf of their predominantly Vietnamese clients who had never fired a rifle in their lives).

Is it significant that the surge in rhino poaching in South Africa began to rocket as soon as the loopholes for illegal trade from South Africa were largely plugged?

Dr George Hughes, former chief executive of the Natal Parks Board/Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife conservation agency renowned for rescuing Southern Africa’s white rhinos from the brink of extinction, says he is not a great believer in coincidences.

Hughes, a career conservationist who has been advocating for a controlled, legal trade in horns for several decades, says: “The moment they did that (declared a domestic moratorium and clamped down on trophy horn hunting) poaching just took off.”

“Criminal syndicates read the newspapers and saw what was happening and once the ball started rolling the poachers discovered that our parks were not impregnable – and now we have lost between 8 000 and 10 000 rhinos in South Africa.”

Trade

According to Dr Hughes, the most viable long-term strategy to reverse the continuing wave of poaching and illegal trade is to ensure sustainable financial incentives for more land-owners to re-build the depleted national rhino herd, by re-opening international horn trade.

It’s an unpopular proposal for many, that has spurred a highly-polarised debate among conservationists and animal-welfare groups for more than four decades.

Nevertheless, the option to re-open trade was revived recently in the SA government’s High-Level Panel report released in May 2021 by national Environment Minister Barbara Creecy.

These lists help to recap some of the main divisions:

AGAINST TRADING:

• It is barbarous, ethically wrong and anachronistic to commodify and trade body parts of an animal on the verge of extinction
• As a member of the Big 5, and the second-largest land mammal globally, rhinos are an iconic species and should not be farmed or reduced to the status of domesticated cows or chickens
• Re-opening trade will fuel unsustainable demand for rhino horn in China and Vietnam and may revive demand from countries like Taiwan and Singapore
• Re-opening trade will send out mixed messages and undermine campaigns to reduce or eliminate consumer demand for horns
• Southern African nations are behaving in a selfish way because they have larger populations of rhinos. Resuming legal trade will drive the small surviving rhino populations of East Africa and Asia to extinction
• A legal trade would provide cover for criminal syndicates to launder poached rhino horns, much like blood diamonds
• There are not enough rhino horns to meet growing demand from natural deaths, captive breeding or stockpiles
• Trading only favours the interests of a small number of captive rhino breeders and speculators whose primary interest is short-term financial profit

FOR TRADING:

• Financial incentives to protect rhinos by selling horns from captive-bred animals (or from natural deaths or legal stockpiles) will help to reduce poaching pressure on wild rhinos and safeguard the species from extinction
• Humanity has been farming and hunting animals for millenia. Many wild species, including elephants, crocodiles, cheetahs etc have been semi-domesticated – but wild specimens remain a major tourist attraction
• Like bans on alcohol, cigarettes or drugs, demand for rhino horn has not abated despite nearly 40 years of international trade prohibition
• Demand reduction campaigns have done little to end demand and may prove futile if current poaching rates continue
• Southern African rhino range states have a right to manage and protect their rhinos using methods that have been more effective in protecting and multiplying rhino numbers compared to nations that ban hunting or sustainable use of wildlife
• Trade will not eliminate poaching or laundering, but the overall benefits of controlled trade outweigh the risks of continued prohibition
• Southern Africa has substantial stockpiles of horns and legal trading would provide new incentives to multiply rhino numbers
• Commercial incentives are vital to landowners to justify keeping rhinos on their land for tourism, hunting or captive breeding instead of switching to more profitable land uses such as crops or mining

Releasing the High-Level Panel report in May 2021, Minister Creecy made it clear that South Africa will not be submitting a proposal to re-open international trade at the next meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) in Costa Rica in 2022.

Nevertheless, a closer reading of the panel recommendations approved by Cabinet suggests that South Africa has not shut the trade door and still aims to submit a future proposal if it can secure broad support from other African and Asian rhino range states.

This recommendation, known as Option 3, confirms that international trade remains illegal, but keeps the door open to resuming trade once certain conditions have been met – including a continued reduction in poaching and moving away from intensive captive-breeding operations. The panel has recommended that Creecy should immediately engage private rhino landowners and other stakeholders to seek broad consensus on horn trading, a lengthy proposal that could take anywhere between six and 15 years.

This would involve building up a “respected negotiating team” to engage other range states over the next three to five CITES meetings, which are held every two to three years.

In short, get ready for another loud, ugly and protracted slugging match between local and global stakeholders with sharply opposed views.

The case for resuming trading is often portrayed as being driven solely by profit-hungry rhino breeders such as John Hume (a South African rancher who has built up a captive population of over 2 000 animals, making him the world’s largest private owner of rhinos).

However, there are several widely-respected conservationists like Dr Hughes who have voiced support, or qualified support, for a resumption of trading. They include the late Dr Ian Player, the former Natal Parks Board ranger and founding force of the Wilderness Foundation which seeks to sustain wildlife and wilderness areas. He was also head of Operation Rhino, the 1960s project to translocate hundreds of animals from Umfolozi Game Reserve to Kruger National Park and other reserves across the nation and other African parks.

Combined with later initiatives in which surplus rhino from Ezemvelo were sold on auction to private ranchers and reserve-owners, Project Rhino was one of the world’s greatest conservation achievements, ultimately leading to a situation where South Africa became the country with the world’s largest number of rhinos.

At the height of the rhino poaching crisis, Player took a controversial decision to support a resumption of the international horn trade. “Everyone wanted to hit me. There was a violent reaction when I said that the time had come to start talking about this,” he told me in an interview shortly before his death in 2014.

“Yes, of course, there are all sorts of dangers with allowing some form of controlled trade. That is inevitable with a commodity of such great value. But we also have to face the reality that government is running out of money. Is there another way to stop what is happening? . . . Nobody can really say until we have tried it.”

Ezemvelo wildlife veterinarian Dr Dave Cooper, who has dedicated his 40-year career to treating and alleviating suffering in wildlife, also supports a resumption of trading, albeit on a structured, experimental basis.

Cooper, who has also had the harrowing task of conducting autopsies on hundreds of poached and badly mutilated rhinos – or chopping off the horns of hundreds more to make them less of a target to poachers – argues that the trading ban has had the perverse effect of making dead rhinos more valuable than living rhinos.

“I still think we should try this (trading) option. In principle, I think it could help tremendously . . . because poaching went up the moment government announced that there would be no domestic trade.”

Like it or not, he says, there is already a massive trade in rhino horns. So the choice, in his view, is between completely illegal trade involving criminal syndicates – or a legal trade that could provide incentives to protect living rhinos.

No room for experiments

But tourism industry veteran Colin Bell – like many others – does not buy into the trading argument.

Bell, a former safari guide and co-founder of high-end ecotourism entities Wilderness Safaris and Natural Selection, warned in 2014 that: “We do not get a second chance if we get the economics of rhino trading wrong; all the rhino in the wild will be gone.

“We have to get our policies right and there’s no room for experiments; viewing rhinos in small secure breeding farms is no substitute. The tragedy of the horn debate is that South Africa’s highly respected rhino custodians (park authorities, field rangers, anti-poaching, monitoring teams) and even politicians have embraced a failed, pro-trade economic model as the answer to the rhino crisis.”

Last year he posted his detailed rebuttal on the trade debate in a 52-minute YouTube video.

He strongly disputes claims that South Africa can supply sufficient volumes of legally-held rhino horns to dampen the illegal demand and believes that re-opening trade will simply put more pressure on national and private rhino reserves.

Bell also denies that the 1977 CITES ban on international trade has not worked, arguing that it had a major impact on reducing poaching levels, especially from 1993 – but the effectiveness of the global ban has been undermined by loopholes that allowed limited trading via South African pseudo-hunting.

Pointing to high levels of corruption and Treasury restrictions on how government revenue can be spent, he scoffs at suggestions that income from legally-traded horns would in practise be ploughed back into rhino protection.

Bell also disputes claims that private rhino owners no longer have a financial incentive to protect rhinos unless they can sell their horns, noting that there are still major incentives to keep rhinos for Big 5 tourism viewing and a limited number of trophy hunts.

Instead, the government should aggressively target the rhino poaching kingpins rather than low-level poachers, clamp down on corruption and stop the “mixed messages” where the public is warned that rhinos are on the verge of extinction, yet simultaneously encouraged to support a new legal trade.

Michael ’t Sas-Rolfes, a resource economist and doctoral researcher at the Oxford Martin Programme on Wildlife Trade, rejects as too simplistic, suggestions that the domestic trade moratorium and stricter hunting restrictions were solely to blame for the sudden poaching flare-up in 2008.

Without pinning his colours to either the pro or anti-trade mast, ’t Sas-Rolfes says: “This a monumentally-complicated topic…”

Rather, he attributes it to a “perfect storm” of events, including the involvement of Asian wildlife traders who came to South Africa originally in search of lion bones, but discovered that rhino horns were also available.

The Asian economy was booming at the time and affluent consumers had disposable income to invest in luxury products. ‘We also need to consider the political changes that took place in South Africa at that time and the related surge in organised crime. What started out as some wildlife ranchers bending the rules rapidly morphed into an opportunity for informal economic transformation.’

On the issue of re-opening trade, ’t Sas-Rolfes says it is impossible to predict the future, and notes that in a worst-case scenario the price of rhino horns could sky-rocket to the benefit of private rhino owners, but put State reserves under further poaching pressure.

He also believes that several Asian range states would be very concerned about the potential risks of resuming legal trade, especially Indonesia, which was custodian to two rhino species now on the verge of extinction. ’t Sas-Rolfes believes it is critical for the government, private sector and other parties to start working together for solutions – and not to assume that any single interest group has the correct answer.

“But if the status quo continues, with the option of future trade unresolved either way, rhinos will remain under threat … and I fear that fatigue will set in. Private owners have been eating into their capital (because of increased security costs and the Covid-related decline in tourist income) while State parks have been losing ground. Our largest populations are already in trouble, so the trajectory towards little pockets of rhino in well-fortified areas will continue.”

Les Carlisle, a wildlife consultant with a 40-year career in private-sector conservation, paints a much bleaker picture: “I don’t think rhinos will ever become extinct – but within five to ten years they will not exist in a free-ranging situation. In five years, it will be extraordinary to see them in the wild. In ten years, you will no longer find them in the wild. We are heading towards a point where you will only see them behind electrified fences with machine-gun posts at every corner.”

“Rhinos are getting hammered in Kruger. The actual number of rhinos killed by poachers has gone down (because there are fewer rhino left), but the number of incursions has not because the poachers are having to work harder to find animals to shoot.”

Carlisle says the number of rhinos poached in Kruger is “staggering” and he fears that the window for re-opening trade is closing slowly.

“Once rhino numbers drop below a certain point it’s almost too risky to talk about trading”, he says, suggesting that over the last five years, the national proportion of rhinos in State reserves has declined from around 75% to 35% of the total population, with the majority of South African rhinos now privately-owned.

“Within the next few years, the private sector will probably own 90%, with just 10% in State reserves. And as the State reserves are depleted, the syndicates will be coming hard against the private sector. The challenge is that the seven main rhino range states currently have no say against 170 other CITES members – and that’s where the problem lies.

“The State conservation agencies cannot afford the continued level of high-security costs required to protect the species – and you also have to ask why senior rangers doing the most to fight poaching in Kruger are getting shifted to other areas where there are no rhinos. The game has changed completely. The amounts of money are just so big that anyone, including rangers and police station commanders, can be bought off.

“The voices of the people who protect the most rhinos have to be heard and trade has to be tried, otherwise we will see the remaining animals being shifted into increasingly smaller enclosures or zoos.

“Conservation is not uniform and we need local solutions for local problems. Rhino horn is a completely renewable resource – so I don’t think this is a difficult debate. Re-opening trade is a no-lose situation. If the horn price rises, it benefits rhino owners – and if it drops, the costs of poaching will outweigh the risks. Either way rhino will benefit.”

Resources

Rhino populations in Kruger National Park – January 2021

Rhino poaching 2020 stats Shades of Grey

Suggested sales mechanism for rhino horn

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