“Make It Legal” by David Cook

Banning the trade in rhino horn has reduced SA to the role of spectator at an extinction event

 “Traditional preventative measures cannot succeed without help from a trade instrument that acts as a disincentive to poaching by replacing poached horn with legal horn drawn from stockpiles.”

JUDGING by the somewhat ambiguous comments attributed to Mavuso Msimang, Department of Environment Affairs (DEA) rhino issue manager, in the press on the bid for a regulated trade in rhino horn as formally proposed by Ezemvelo, the DEA and the South African Government are not prepared to carry this forward to the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) Conference of the Parties (CoP) in March 2013.

The deadline for submissions to Cites has in any event come and gone — this, three months after Ezemvelo KZN Wildlife put forward its Cites proposal document. Citing too little time in which to prepare and unspecified legal obstacles, these official excuses screen a much deeper malaise — a department which seems unable to face up to the reality of the crisis, seems overly attentive to emotive anti-trade propaganda and conveys the impression that it will do anything to appease international dogma in the form of the now discredited Cites trade ban.

The grim fact is that extinction at current rates of poaching—or a situation approximating the start point in Zululand in the sixties when only 600 white rhino and even fewer of the black species survived—is a mere 20 years away. Unlike Kenya, which started off with 60 000 rhino in 1960 and now shamefully has only 1 000 left, South Africa has over 22 000, 18 000 of them white, all descended from the 600 surviving nucleus saved by the Ian Player led team in Umfolozi in 1960.

Then again the DEA’s decision not to seek support for a legal trade at Cites in 2013 should come as no surprise. Since the Rhino Summit held in 2010, irregularities in the administration of the wildlife industry and a number of high-profile cases of blatant abuse, the department has shown a marked lack of appetite for any new solutions. But there is more.

The failure of the DEA delegates to the Cites Standing Committee meeting in Geneva in July this year even to mention the furious debate going on in South Africa at the time over the merits of a legal trade in horn and the growing support it was receiving from prominent wildlife figures, provide ample evidence of resistance to change.

A supreme opportunity was missed to declare to the international conservation bureaucracies of the Western world that 35 years of a ban on trade in rhino horn had done absolutely nothing to save the species. It had, in fact, played directly into the hands of the black-market trade in rhino horn and reduced South Africa, which holds 75% of the world’s rhino population, to the role of a spectator at an extinction event.

What then is the DEA position—if it has one at all? Complaining about a lack of time to prepare the ground for a Cites proposal ( is two years not enough?), prevarication in the form of time-wasting investigations, a Parliamentary portfolio hearing on rhino poaching solutions and, latterly, the wide ranging consultative process conducted through workshops and meetings with interested parties, the answer is simply business as usual. But carrying on doing the same thing with the same result surely challenges basic human intelligence.

Much the same may be said of many mainstream conservation NGOs that declined to declare open support for Ezemvelo’s legal trade proposal when it was most needed, leaving the bid seriously weakened. Instead, their contribution to the anti-poaching campaign in the form of eye catching support measures, public-awareness events and fundraising programmes has produced little in the way of results.

The events of the past few weeks in which Ezemvelo discovered the carcases of 10 rhino poached in Hluhluwe/Umfolozi reveal the well-nigh impossible task of defeating the poaching menace using defensive strategies alone. Ezemvelo has arguably the most efficient anti-poaching team in the country, operating over protected areas with well-developed relationships in place with neighbouring communities that act as an intelligence filter to criminal activity.

Yet the poachers struck, in one instance in a small private reserve, killing a rhino fitted with a hi-tech tracking device to aid surveillance.

With the stakes as high as USD60000 per kg. a single act of climbing over or through a fence , a panga in one hand and a borrowed or supplied rifle in the other, to kill a rhino (as easy an act as shooting a cow standing in a pasture), hack off its horn and retreat over the fence to receive a handsome payoff equal to many years income , is simply irresistible ; no wonder also that such a lucrative temptation attracts the odd case of corruption within the ranks of official staff.

Traditional preventative measures cannot succeed without help from a trade instrument that acts as a disincentive to poaching by replacing poached horn with legal horn drawn from stockpiles. Here in KZN, we may not have long porous international borders to our parks, but, instead, have to contend with the lowest of low hanging fruit in the form of many rhino concentrated in small protected areas situated amid impoverished rural communities with unemployment rates of over 40% and easy escape routes for criminals into nearby urban areas.

Our KZN reserves are extremely vulnerable to poaching. It remains a comparatively low-risk activity on account of the cover afforded by rugged terrain and thick vegetation. Under these conditions, effective protection of rhino by even the best-trained and most well-equipped army of rangers that the flushest of budgets could afford, is rendered extremely difficult.

South Africa’s rhino can be saved through common sense. Replace the illegal trade in rhino horn with a legal trade and we might just regain control of our natural heritage.

South Africa's rhino can be saved through rational use of practical common sense , not misguided allegiance to noble but completely impractical animal rights ethics - an ideology that could be argued already has the death of over 1200 rhino, and rising, to ponder". Replace the illegal trade in rhino horn with a legal trade and we might just regain control of our natural heritage.

 

• David Cook is a former Natal Parks Board senior officer and environmental consultant.

 THE WITNESS - PIETERMARITZBURG, OCTOBER 16, 2012

Posterous theme by Cory Watilo