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/

There are two kinds of people who stand up for the world’s critically endangered animals, such as rhinos: Those who talk, and those who do.

“Doing” is preferable — no news flash there — but direct action has a way of provoking controversy, even at the best of times.

And not much is more controversial these days than the use of heavily armed guards, many of them U.S. army veterans recently emerged from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan, in the bush war against poachers in private game reserves in South Africa, and a handful of other countries.

The public controversy has simmered since 2013, when an Animal Planet docuseries Battleground: Rhino Wars — the Discovery Communications-owned cable channel’sfollow-up to its popular Whale Wars series — introduced ordinary TV viewers to the concept of mercenaries in the service of wildlife conservation.

An expansive exposé in the UK Guardian newspaper last month briefly touched on the somewhat uncomfortable optics — uncomfortable to some, anyway, especially in post-apartheid South Africa — of heavily armed outsiders, mostly white, imported to combat the problem of poaching by local, mainly black Africans.

Like much of The Guardian’s journalism, the exposé — by veteran Guardian Africa correspondent Jason Burke — weighed different points-of-view, and raised issues the casual observer might not have realized. One unexpected factor, for example, is the reality that many of the U.S. army veterans involved are recovering emotionally and physically from post-traumatic stress. By fighting for a cause they believe in, by putting their lives on the line — once again, but this time for critically endangered animals — many of these veterans see the initiative as a way to ease back into civilian life after weeks, months and even years of intensive firefights in Afghanistan.

“Green militarization,” as it’s called, has its critics. The scale of the crisis facing Africa’s rhinos is clear to almost everyone, though, especially in a world where rhino horn, which is made primarily of keratin — the same substance as fingernails — is now worth $65,000 USD per kilo on the black market, according to recent conservative estimates.

In 2007, a mere 10 years ago, no more than a dozen rhinos were poached in South Africa. In 2015 alone, according to The Guardian, that number jumped to 1,200.

Given that a rhino’s gestation period is 16 months, and given that a rhino has just one baby at birth, one doesn’t need to be a mathematician to see that the numbers are untenable.

South Africa is critical to the species’ survival because the country is home to 80% of the world’s surviving wild rhinos.

At the time Battleground: Rhino Wars debuted on U.S. television, Animal Planet president and general manager Marjorie Kaplan told an assembled group of reporters and TV critics in Pasadena, Calif. that more than 100 African park rangers were killed the previous year while trying to protect the continent’s wildlife reserves.

“Make no mistake, this is war,” Kaplan told the assembled reporters. “The men and women protecting rhinos on the ground in South Africa are outgunned and outmanned. This is not about threatened habitat. This is not about human encroachment. This is pure greed, and pure ignorance. There is absolutely no justification for these creatures to be dying. The people who are risking their lives to to protect them are heroes.”

Former US Navy SEAL Craig “Sawman” Sawyer, one of the original team leaders in the anti-poaching initiative and one of the leading voices behind Animal Planet’s Rhino Wars, said the poaching problem has many faces. It isn’t just about impoverished locals trying to make a living.

“It’s a mix,” Sawyer said. “It’s the locals. It’s an international problem. This is major money, a multibillion-dollar business going on. With each rhino horn being worth up to half a million dollars, it’s easy to see the lure there. So what we have to do is change the incentive. We need to come up with a multifaceted approach to address the problem. Because this species is on the brink of extinction. They’ve been around for 50 million years, and in the past 50 years alone, man has almost completely wiped them out. We’re at the redline crisis at this point.”

A number of poachers caught in the Rhino Wars net said they wanted to get out of the criminal life, but had a hard time finding jobs. Some of those same ex-poachers have since been hired by ranchers to help protect the dwindling rhino herds, as they have intimate, first-hand knowledge of how poaching is done and the most effective way to prevent it.

Sawyer said action beats words every time.

“In our role here, we have an opportunity to directly address the physical problem of poaching,” he said. “With our backgrounds, coming from the special operations community, that’s what we can contribute. Our fight is travelling halfway around the globe and risking our lives personally to join the South Africans in their fight to save not only a national resource but a global resource. We’re all losing our rhino, okay? We’re over there fighting this fight to try to save the rhino and also raise awareness. If we take it to them, maybe we can help spread the word. Maybe we can raise global awareness and bring some pressure against this threat to the rhino, and actually maybe even save the species.”

Outfits such as the US-based nonprofit organization Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife (Vetpaw) serve a two-fold purpose: to draw a line in the sand against the wholesale slaughter of rhinos, and to help former combat veterans in the US find a renewed purpose in life. The Guardian noted that many former servicemen suffer high levels of unemployment and mental illness — PTSD by any other name. Ex-servicemen often struggle to reclaim the sense of brotherhood they got from combat. Despite millions of dollars spent on training — billions of dollars, even — the US government doesn’t use them again. Helping protect wildlife affords them a renewed sense of meaning and self-worth.

Vetpaw founder and squad leader Ryan Tate, a former US Marine, told The Guardian that he selected combat veterans precisely because they are disciplined enough, experienced, battle-hardened and well trained enough not to use lethal force unless absolutely necessary. Poachers are apprehended in the act, and then turned over to local police. Alive.

Another Vetpaw commando, a British-born veteran who served 15 years in the US elite special forces until last year, told The Guardian that the rhino wars are textbook counterinsurgency — about winning hearts and minds on the ground, rather than actual firefights.

“Let’s not sugarcoat it,” Sawyer said, back when Rhino Wars first aired on US television. “We’ve got hardcore crime syndicates coming in from Mozambique, armed with AK-47s, not only slaughtering an entire species but anyone who gets in their way. More than 100 rangers have been killed trying to protect the rhino, whether they were armed or not. This war is on. And we can either sit back and go, ‘Isn’t that unfortunate? We don’t have the heart to deal with it.’ Or we can pick up arms and go and face the enemy and tell them, ‘Hell, no.’”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/may/30/us-army-veterans-find-peace-protecting-rhinos-poaching-south-africa

Journal

“Man is modifying the world so fast and so drastically that most animals cannot adapt to the new conditions. In the Himalaya as elsewhere there is a great dying, one infinitely sadder than the Pleistocene extinctions, for man now has the knowledge and the need to save the remnants of his past.”

— Peter Matthiessen

Rhinos — born to be wild, not farmed.

“Hell no. This war is ON.” From the front lines in the rhino wars.

Journal

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