Rhinos — born to be wild, not farmed.

June 02, 2018

The curious conservation conundrum surrounding rhino rancher John Hume and his 1,500 rhinos has been in the news for some time now in his native South Africa. Hume hopes to harvest their horns — made of keratin, the same substance as human fingernails, the horns can be cut off and harvested without causing pain or harm to the animal — and in theory help save the species, by flooding the black market with legally sourced rhino horn and — in theory — put black market profiteers, and rhino poachers, out of business.

That’s the theory, anyway. Alarmed conservationists say flooding the market with supposedly legitimate rhino horn would only boost demand. It would be difficult if not impossible, they say, to distinguish legal horn from illegal horn. It would send a message, too, that rhino horn is a perfectly legitimate product, provided it’s sourced properly.

Any number of conservation laws and protections would have to be lifted for Hume to turn his idea into a long-term, thriving business, and so far lawmakers have been doubtful — not just in South Africa, but throughout the world.

Hume has argued that if something isn’t done soon to make rhino horn legal, he’ll go out of business, since keeping and breeding 1,500 rhinos isn’t exactly cheap.

Irony aside, a major part of his expenses is hiring security for his ranch, to ensure that rhino poachers — heavily armed and well organized — don’t whack his own farm animals to turn a quick buck on the black market.

The story, with all its twists and turns, would have stayed in South Africa and a handful of European countries but for the top-rated US TV news program 60 Minutes, now in its 50th season. Last weekend, 60 Minutes aired a 15-minute segment on Hume’s rhino ranch and the attending controversy.

The segment, ironically enough, was reported by 60 Minutes veteran Lara Logan, herself a native of South Africa, having been born and raised in Durban.

Hume, perhaps mindful of the present occupant of the U.S. presidency — the U.S. president’s a two sons are both avid big-game hunters and, what’s more, proud of shooting animals in Africa, whether those animals are on the endangered species list or not — talked a good game. He equated the legal ban on rhino horn to Prohibition, pointing out that when Prohibition was finally lifted, organIzed crime was squeezed out of the booze business.

No one thought to mention, least of all Logan, that the economics of scale don’t quite fit: Booze can be distilled relatively inexpensively — at least, compared to farming rhinos — and distributed relatively easily, across a wide area, to an expansive and and growing market that includes, well, just about everyone.

Raising rhinos, on the other hand, is expensive, slow and time-consuming. A rhino’s gestation period is 18 months, and rhinos, both the northern black and southern white rhinos, have just one baby at a time. They don’t breed like rats, in other words, or even cows or horses.

Besides, not everyone is in the market for rhino horn — even if it is worth more per gram than gold. The appetite is so great for rhino horn is now so great that it fetches up to USD 100,000/kg.

©David Chancellor/Kiosk-National Geographic6

There may be many, many people in Vietnam, China, Laos and Thailand, but even there, not everyone believes rhino horn will cure cancer (it doesn’t) or make one’s erection bigger and last longer (it won’t).

Curiously, the market in rhino horn for making dagger handles in the Arabian peninsular and Gulf oil states has fallen on hard times of late, perhaps because oil sheikhs and idle Saudi princes have found more malleable, sought-after materials to show off as status symbols, or perhaps it’s that rhino horn’s reputation as an aphrodisiac and cure-all for every disease known to humankind — not to mention it works wonders for hangovers! — now outweighs mere vanity in the futures markets.

Hume insists he’s been teetering on the edge of bankruptcy for years now and that his financial situation is growingly untenable. The truth is that no one can predict with any degree of certainty whether suddenly flooding the market with legitimate rhino horn would have any effect on poaching, up or down. A similar, even more hotly contested debate over ivory and elephant poaching keeps flaring up at international wildlife meetings, including the meetings last year of the international regulatory boards CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) and IUCN (the International Union for Conservation of Nature). The evidence would seem to lean toward the conservationists’ argument that lifting sanctions on the sale of rhino horn, whether legitimately sourced or not, would only lead to the killing of more rhinos.

Since rhino populations have taken an absolute pasting over the past several years, that is not good environmental science, no matter which way you slice it.

And by the time consumers in China and Vietnam realize that, sadly, rhino horn will not cure cancer or make one’s erection bigger or last longer, there may be no rhinos left to disprove the theory.

There’s also the inconvenient truth that rhinos are warm-blooded, sentient beings; as much as Hume would like us to believe that farming these holdovers from the late Miocene era (that’s 6 million years ago, if you’re keeping count) is no different than farming pigs and cows, the plain fact is that rhinos were born to be wild.

There was a moment during last weekend’s 60 Minutes segment when Hume called dozens of rhinos onto a dusty, desert-like plain to feed on handouts of alfalfa feed in stone troughs; it was as close to a vision of animal hell as I ever hope to see. Logan, a veteran war correspondent who was embedded with US forces during both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, looked horrified. It was about as far from seeing a rhino — a largely solitary, often unsociable animal — in its natural surroundings as it’s possible to imagine, and still be looking at a living rhino.

If this is the future of the species, one can be forgiven for thinking it’s not worth it.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/controversial-rhino-horn-sales-eyed-as-solution-to-poaching-crisis/

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/helping-orphaned-rhino-find-their-way/

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/11/11/can-farming-rhinos-horns-save-species/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/31/how-chopping-off-their-horns-helps-save-rhinos-from-poachers

https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/05/why-does-a-rhino-horn-cost-300-000-because-vietnam-thinks-it-cures-cancer-and-hangovers/275881/

Big Cats Initiative + World Wildlife Day = Causing an uproar.

February 28, 2018

Think about this: We have lost 95% of the world’s wild tigers in the past century. During that time, lion populations have crashed 40% — in just three generations. That’s just one reason why, this year, World Wildlife Day (Saturday) is focusing on the plight facing the world’s #BigCats.

It’s the reason South Africa-born husband-and-wife naturalist team Beverly Joubert and Dereck Joubert have made big-cat conservation their life’s calling, and why they were instrumental in founding National Geographic’s Big Cat Initiative in 2009. (https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/big-cats-initiative/about/)

This may sound obvious to anyone who’s thought about the implications — long-term and short-term — of overpopulation, climate change and rampant consumption, but to hear Dereck and Beverly Joubert tell it, it’s not obvious at all to ordinary, everyday people who are too busy feeding their families and keeping a roof over their heads to worry about whether lions will go the way of the Tasmanian tiger and sabre-toothed cat. Historically, the Tasmanian tiger — once found throughout the continent of Australia — became extinct on the mainland some 3,000 years ago. The last known Tasmanian tiger died at Australia’s Hobart Zoo in 1936; the species was declared extinct in 1982.

©University of Melbourne - Museums Victoria

Unless something is done, and done quickly, the Jouberts told a rapt audience several years ago at a meeting of the Television Critics Association in Beverly Hills, Calif., iconic apex predators like the lion, tiger, jaguar, puma, cheetah and leopard could vanish by mid-century.

“We’ve been studying and looking at big cats now for about 30 years,” Dereck Joubert told reporters at a meeting sponsored by National Geographic’s NatGeoWild digital channel, “and one of the alarming things for us, which was the genesis of (this project) actually, was the realization that, in our lifetimes, lions have dropped from 450,000 down to 20,000, and leopard numbers are from 700,000 down to about 50,000. If you take an extension of that curve, you will imagine these big cats to be extinct within the next 10 or 15 years.

“We’ve been working on this for a long time. But now is the time to bring it to wider attention.”

As World Wildlife Day dawns, CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) is anxious to put a familiar face on wildlife conservation efforts around the world. It isn’t just to do with lions, of course, but lions are an emblematic symbol that almost anyone can recognize, from the youngest child to the most jaded, cynical adult.

“What’s important ultimately, and what's going to help us with the Big Cats Initiative, is getting the message out,” Beverly Joubert said. “A lot of people don't believe there is even a problem, so they say, ‘Why should we worry?’ Through the Big Cats Initiative, we've managed to raise money for cheetahs, for example, so we will have a lot of cheetah programs out there. We're not only looking at lions and leopards.

“Big cats are the iconic species. They’re the apex predator. If the apex predator is taken out of the system, the whole system collapses. We need the apex predators we can maintain corridors for elephants, for antelope, for the tiny little dung beetles. Everything is connected. It’s vitally important.”

Apologists for the hunting industry often argue that hunting is vital economically for species survival.

Balderdash, Dereck Joubert scoffs — though he’s inclined to use a stronger modifier.

“We are very, very adamant about hunting. This is all about ego. They call it recreational hunting, as if we could also be talking about playing tennis. Some people go out and take some great delight in the killing of these animals. Five hundred lion skins — lions in dead form — come into the United States every year as hunting trophies and safari trophies. With 20,000 lions left, you know that's not sustainable.”

Learning endangered species’ day-to-day life habits is key to ensuring its long-term survival, Beverly Joubert added. That’s part of what the Big Cats Initiative is all about and, in the bigger picture, World Wildlife Day itself.

“We want to be able to look at that unique behaviour right now and see how we can utilize what has happened in the past and where we are in the present and use that to give us a better idea of what’s going to happen in the future,” she said. “It’s looking at the plight of these cats, learning from it and applying those lessons to the future, whether it’s to do with hunting and poaching or just protecting these wildlife corridors.”

World Wildlife Day could just as easily be about the dung beetle or leopard tortoise, Dereck Joubert believes.

But.

“There are a number of great iconic species, and I think it’s our job to pick them and highlight them. The conservation that goes on around these other species is just as valid, but you gotta pick the cheerleaders.

“Also, we have a lot more fun filming lions that dung beetles,” he said.

“But we still film those dung beetles,” Beverly Joubert chimed in.

They’re all connected.

Except where noted otherwise, the images in this post were taken by Beverly Joubert in association with National Geographic/Big Cats Initiative. World Wildlife Day is Sat., March 3. #PredatorsUnderThreat #WWD2018 #BigCats

‘A great photo tells a story’ — veteran National Geographic photojournalist Steve Winter.

November 30, 2017

There are as many photographs as there are photographers with cameras and subjects to photograph, but one thing links them all, Steve Winter believes.

“My father used to say there are three things you need to have in a great photograph: composition, composition, composition,” Winter said, during a wide-ranging, sit-down conversation in Los Angeles this past summer.

The career National Geographic photographer and Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2017 finalist has a new photo essay in December’s National Geographic magazine, “Kingdom of the Jaguar,” with an article by writer Chip Brown, along with a new nature film, Jaguar vs. Croc, which Winter recorded in Brazil’s Pantanal region with cameraman Bertie Gregory. Jaguar vs. Croc will premiere on NatGeo Wild in the US and National Geographic channels around the world on Dec. 10, to kick off NatGeo’s eighth annual “Big Cat Week.”

“Like any art form, a photograph needs to connect emotionally with the viewer,” Winter explained. “Without that you have nothing.”

Winter wants to give viewers pause, with his own photos. For the past 26 years he has specialized in conservation photography, specifically big cats, a vocation that has seen him journey around the world, to grasslands, savannahs, rainforests, mountain peaks and arid deserts.

“Obviously, with a great photograph, you want your eye to move around the frame, but without that emotion there’s really nothing,” Winter continued. “As far as my work with big cats goes, I want something that also that makes you stop and go, ‘ah.’

“A lot of people look at some of my pictures and think they’re photoshopped. I love that. Because that means your brain had to a connect in a way that you actually had that thought, rather than just look at it and move on.”

Winter is fastidious about not using bait, or any other form of human interference that could affect the natural behaviour of the animal he’s trying to photograph. Working for National Geographic affords him that luxury, he says: He lives, breathes and sleeps in the field for months at a time, in pursuit of that elusive, all-important single image that tells a story that hasn’t been told before.

Arguably his most famous photograph, of a wild mountain lion living in Griffith Park the Hollywood Hills, in the heart of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, was taken with a camera trap. The cat, dubbed P-22 and fitted with a remote-control tracking collar by local field biologists, arguably became the most famous city-dwelling big cat on the planet, if only for a moment, owing to that one image.

Without camera traps, many of the world’s most elusive animals would never be captured in the wild, exhibiting natural behaviour. The world might not even know they exist. It’s good that people know such animals do exist, as habitat destruction is the single greatest threat facing them. The camera trap has done more to aid wildlife conservation efforts than perhaps any recent breakthrough in scientific technology.

“The Hollywood Cougar,” as Winter’s 2013 photo has come to be known, “looks fake,” he said, “but it’s not.

“I’ve never baited. We never do that. We spend so much trying to get that photograph that nobody’s ever seen — why would I waste my time or my assets or my anything baiting? That’s why I get two-and-a-half months to do an assignment.”

Winter’s recent work with jaguars involved old-fashioned sweating in the jungle and staking out jungle trails, finding and photographing big cats the old-fashioned way, but it was camera traps that shaped his earliest National Geographic assignments.

“Camera traps changed the game for me because I opened my mouth and said that I would do snow leopards. In 1999 my editor sent an email out and it took me seven years to start the story, because I don’t like the cold. I had used camera traps on jaguars to fairly nominal effect, and that’s how I found the Pantanal. (One of the unintended success stories of my career is finding the Pantanal and it now being where everybody goes to see jaguars.)

“Camera traps changed the game for me because I said I’d do something that l could never have done without camera traps. To this day, every wild snow leopard picture that anybody gets is one of the luckiest things they’ve gotten, and will ever get, and it all goes back to that.”

He came to jaguars for Jaguars vs. Croc honestly.

“I did the first ever jaguar story for the National Geographic. I did it partly for economic reasons. I was struggling to do stories other people hadn’t done because I wouldn’t get a ‘no.’

“I had a great interest in jaguars because my first ever animal encounter with a big cat was with a black jaguar, one night in Guatemala. It came up to my door at night because cats are curious. Scratched under the door, sniffed. Luckily the door was locked.

“If anybody would have told me then my next story would be jaguars I would have told them they were crazy, because I didn’t know anything about them.

“Then I found out that National Geographic had never done a story on jaguars. My wife, who is the smarter of the two, said, ‘If Nat Geo has never done a story on the world’s third biggest cat, don’t you figure there must be a good reason why?’”

Adjusting back to civilization after a long time in the wild can pose its own challenges. Winter, just hours off a flight from Peru, was sitting in the lobby bar of the Beverly Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, Calif., home to Hollywood royalty and a history that dates back to the silent movies, just a half-hour’s drive inland from Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean.

“When I first started, I had a very difficult time coming home. Because you could go from the Pantanal, which was my second wildlife story since I was a photojournalist, and then be driving over the Pulaski Skyway through Newark and seeing Manhattan in the distance and going home, after being gone for two months. It was psychologically difficult. How I got through it is I call home twice a day and talk to my wife. In the beginning, it was satellite phones, because I had no choice.

“That’s 100% true. If I wasn’t connected, number one, I couldn’t do my job. Some people say, ‘Oh I don’t call home, because psychologically that’d screw me up.’ No. Because I have a psychological life outside of where I am doing these stories. That life is valuable to me. My family is valuable to me. I have a connection that I found was necessary.

“Now, after all these years, we’re still together, working together, and loving working together. I know a lot of people say, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t want to do that.’ Not me. I’m so lucky in many areas. I’m doing my life. I’m living my dream. And I get to work with my wife.”

When in public, Winter is often asked if he’s ever been in perilous situations photographing some of the world’s most dangerous predators, in their backyard. It’s not a foolish question exactly, Winter says, but there’s a simple answer.

“Close calls, I’ve had quite a few. The one thing you have to realize is that we’re not a part of any of these predators’ image search, haven’t been for millennia. The reason people fear sharks or big cats is because of a few individual circumstances, whether it’s Jaws, The Man-eaters of Tsavo, Jim Corbett’s tales of man-eating tigers and leopards — these individual tales have created this collective fear in us.

“But these animals have no desire to hunt us. Every situation that I’ve been in where I’ve been scared me to death, where I can’t breathe, has been through accidental circumstances. On my first jaguar story, I was following a cat who decided he was going to follow me, and I accidentally came within 12 feet from him. That’s how I got my opening picture. I couldn’t breathe, I was shaking so bad, I figured it’d be blurry. It wasn’t.

“Usually, for me, it’s coming into an animal’s territory when they don’t want you there. You live and learn. Everything’s a learning experience. One of the most important parts of my life has been making mistakes and or being in uncomfortable situations, and then doing a better job and acting differently the next time. You need to learn that in the natural world. Especially for a layman such as I was when I started out. My education was funded by the National Geographic, I like to say. I learned all about big cats from just doing.”

Winter is now active on the lecture circuit. Far from being a letdown after the excitement of being in the field, Winter says it has opened a whole new road in his life’s path. Holding an auditorium’s attention is a challenge in its own right.

“I start with a video, and then it’s a constant barrage. Well, not a barrage, exactly but I do try to show a lot of work in a short period of time. I make every effort to make it personal. I always used to say that if I wasn’t onstage, I’d be in the crowd. And as long as I think that way, then I can hold the crowd. Because that makes it personal.

“The most important aspect to me are the school lectures. Because I can hold people. I’m very proud of my NG Live [National Geographic Live] tour and selling out the Sydney Opera House for the first time in NG Live history, and all that. But to keep kids’ attention and then have teachers come up aghast, where they saying,‘You could’ve heard a pin drop. How did you do that? I know these kids. I’m their teacher; I can’t keep them quiet’ — that means everything to me. Sometimes you’ll have 2,500 kids, and that is a challenge.

“One other thing I wanted to say. It’s my new career, and I love it more than anything than I’ve done recently — standing in front of a crowd and telling my stories. Because I don’t see people when they turn the page of the magazine. I don’t sit in their living room while they watch the television programs. But I can watch their faces as I‘m standing onstage, and I absolutely love it.”

https://www.npr.org/sections/pictureshow/2010/08/05/128999515/steve-winter

Rhino horn auction is pointless, animal rights groups say.

September 28, 2017

If there were a one-off sale of illegal drugs, would it kill the drug trade?

It’s not an entirely pointless question.

That exact reasoning — take something that’s illegal and make it temporarily legal, to satisfy demand and discourage black marketeers — was the excuse/aim/purpose/rationalization/justification, whatever you care to call it, behind a one-off auction of rhino horn last month in South Africa.

This was not a government auction, though the South African government sanctioned it, albeit begrudgingly. At first.

The auction was organized by a private rhino rancher in South Africa, John Hume. He took the government to court — at the time, South Africa was insisting that wildlife laws and international trade agreements be honoured — and won the right to sell 265 rhino horns, weighing about 500 kg. Hume owns and has bred more than 1,100 rhinos, according to published reports.

The absurd price of rhino horn — USD $100,000 per kilogram on the black market, more than the price of platinum — is driven by demand in, guess where, Asia. Ten years ago, rhino poaching had been virtually eliminated. Since 2013, an average of 1,000 rhinos have been poached each and every year, with a dramatic spike in the past 24 months, especially in South Africa, home to the world’s largest surviving population of rhinos, both captive and wild.

With World Rhino Day having passed a week ago and World Animal Day just around the corner (Oct. 4), the issue of rhino poaching is once again part of the public conversation.

It’s too early to judge what effect, if any, the auction had. Rhino poaching was already out of control — it has been for the past two years — and if the sudden accessibility of “legitimate” rhino horn on the market is going to stem the illegal trade, it will take weeks if not months to register.

Conservationists meanwhile argue the sudden availability of rhino horn will only boost the market, not discourage it, as the auction’s promoters insist.

It’s not an isolated, one-off debate. Many governments in southern Africa — Zimbabwe, Namibia, Mozambique, Botswana, Malawi, Zambia and South Africa itself — are sitting on stores ofvaluable ivory in the form of elephant tusks. Southern African governments — with the notable exception of Botswana — have called for one-off legal sales of ivory, to fund conservation programs.

In East Africa the issue has divided Kenya, the mosthigh-profile and successful tourist destination of Africa’s wildlife countries, where trophy hunting has been banned across the board, and Tanzania, home to East Africa’s largest population of wild elephants — by far — and a vocal supporter of trophy hunting.

The international trade in both ivory and rhino horn has been banned, thanks to an agreement by the member states of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a kind of United Nations of countries with indigenous wildlife — virtually every country on the planet.

To get technical about it — and while no one likes to be snarled in legal verbiage and technical jargon, it’s good to know — rhinos are listed on Appendix 1 of the CITES index, which means horns cannot be legally taken out of South Africa into any signatory CITES state. The auction, in other words, was only applicable to buyers in South Africa, as the South African court’s jurisdiction only applies to its home country. (Yes, that might seem to be obvious, but the obvious has a way of being obscured whenever large sums of money are involved.

The international ban in trade of ivory and rhino horn has led to a flourishing black market. Until the issue of demand is addressed — do the Chinese really need ivory trinkets and powdered rhino horn? — the black market will always thrive. Law enforcement can only do so much.

And when crazy ideas enter into the equation — the widespread belief, for example, that powdered rhino horn cures cancer and enhances one’s sex life — solving the problem becomes that much more difficult. “I think, therefore I am” becomes “I believe, therefore I’m right.”

Conservationists argue, however, that legal auctions have the opposite effect: The result of one-off legal sales creates an explosion in demand, as what was once forbidden is now legally available. Those involved in the enforcement of wildlife laws also argue — plausibly, it would seem to me — that it becomes almost impossible to tell the difference between “legal” ivory (or rhino horn) and that which has been illegally poached. Tanzania, which has lobbied hard for the legal sale of its stored elephant tusks — to fund conservation efforts, they say, though detractors argue that cash earmarked for conservation has a funny way of disappearing before it’s used for its stated, intended purposes — etches serial numbers into its elephant tusks, serial numbers that can be modified or scratched off entirely.

Interestingly, in an effort to save a critically endangered species, hundreds of rhinos have been imported to Australia, with its similar climate, though that will not dissuade the international crime syndicates if they’re motivated enough and the population in Africa crashes.

Rhino ranchers argue that, instead of killing wild rhinos, as poachers do, they can harvest the horn from living rhinos, as with livestock. Each rhino’s horn is trimmed, like wool sheared from a sheep, and the pieces are stored, in expectation of a future sale.

The real irony, of course, is that the market for rhino horn in South Africa itself — and other countries — is negligible, if not nonexistent. As a general rule, Africans do not believe that rhino horn, ground up and sprinkled in a glass of water, cures headaches, hangovers and high blood pressure, let alone cancer.

As Paula Kahumbu, CEO and director of the animal-rights advocacy and conservation group Wildlife Direct wrote last month in an op-ed piece for theGuardian newspaper, you can kill all the rhinos you want, but people will still die from cancer.