Bushmeat in Canada

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The April 22 issue of Maclean’s magazine carried a story by reporter Sarah Elton about bushmeat. I don’t know if she also came up with the title, Gorillas in our midst but it was a nice pun on the Diane Fossey book title and subsequent movie Gorillas in theMist. 

A similar article titled Monkeys on the menu  appeared in the April 15 on-line version of the magazine

A roadside bushmeat vendor in Cameroon. He\is just trying to make a living

It was good to see this important issue highlighted, but as someone who has witnessed the bushmeat trade first-hand and written about it in some detail I found that there were some missing elements that should have been covered.  I wrote the following letter to the magazine’s editor and in due course received a reply telling me that it had been forwarded to Ms Elton.

Of course I had the luxury, in my book The Trouble With Lions (U of Alberta Press 2008) of being able to explore the subject outside the restrictions of the kind of word limit required in a magazine article, but I believe that the disease issues I raised are important.

Here is the letter, unedited from what I sent, but with two of my own pictures slotted in at appropriate spots, as I cannot use the ones from the magazine.

Dear Mr. Stevenson,

Sarah Elton’s story on bushmeat, with its clever punning title Gorilla in our midst is, like the curate’s egg of Punch cartoon fame, good in parts. She misses a few really important points. I have worked in Africa for many years and also written books and blogs on the continent’s wildlife. I have three chapters in my book The Trouble With Lions that cover this subject in some detail. The third one is titled Bushmeat and Bureaucrats. Like the members of this corps worldwide it seems that Canadian ones are slow to act.

I realize that Elton was constrained by a word limit, but the Photoshopped image of the gorilla head on the meat counter made a nice point and was perhaps a worthy replacement for the 1000 extra words the article needed. She has however either missed out on or is misinformed about disease risks.

Foot and mouth disease is endemic in much of Africa and all cloven-hoofed species are susceptible. Canada’s last outbreak of this economically disastrous plague occurred in Saskatchewan in 1952. It was traced back to the importation of smoked meat from Poland. Bushmeat from Africa poses at least as great a risk.

Monkey pox is misnamed (not Elton’s fault). It is a disease of rodents – remember the outbreak in the USA that was linked to pet gophers in 2003. People in Africa, desperate for protein are eating species once considered taboo. The Wakamba of Kenya, a tribe famed as hunters, are amongst them.

Egyption fruit bats in a cave in Queen Elizabeth NP in Uganda

Fruit bats, a common bushmeat item, carry Ebola and the closely related Marburg virus. Both are deadly to humans. For several years I took senior veterinary students to Uganda and a highlight was a visit to a cave in Queen Elizabeth National Park that was the daytime home to an estimated 100,000 bats. That stopped after an unfortunate Dutch woman who had visited the cave contracted Marburg and died at home in Holland. The cave is now off-limits to all.

AIDS is a disease that crossed from primates into humans at least seven times in the 20^th century. There are two main virus types, HIV1 and HIV2. 

A chimp feeding on fruit in Uganda

Beatrice Hahn, a professor at the University of Alabama showed that chimpanzees are the source of HIV1 while sooty mangabeys, a small almost uniformly grey monkey from West Africa are the source of HIV2. Even more fascinating is that the two viruses in humans are less closely related to one another than they are to their original primate hosts.

I realize that in this little précis I have exceeded the 300-word limit, but I do have lots of other examples and I also quoted Dr. Brashares in my book. I also have good pictures of those fruit bats and of a local bushmeat vendor with whom I had a couple of long chats. He is from rural Cameroon and is just trying to make a living in a forest region where livestock cannot be raised.

Yours sincerely

Jerry Haigh BVMS, MSc, FRCVS

I signed off using my Professor Emeritus status in the hope that I would be taken seriously. I just hope that foot-and-mouth disease does not get into Canada, or indeed North America, through the bushmeat route. This is a real case of my not wanting to be an accurate prophet. 

I have not heard another word, either from the magazine or the author.  Ah well!

Dinosaur and elephant cooling

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I am a dedicated listener to the Saturday noon-hour radio show Quirks and Quarks. When I first got addicted Jay Ingram, who leads the Banff Science Communications program each year was the show’s host. For many years now Bob MacDonald has been the man.

Today’s show had story about dinosaurs and the question of how they might handle heat. You can listen to the entire interview (for the next 6 weeks) on the CBC podcast here

As soon as the show was over I sent this letter (slightly edited) to the CBC Q&Q contacts page. I’ll let you know if I get a response.

Your story with the dinosaur researcher Mike Rowe reminded me of two things. One was the light-hearted article in the Journal Of Irreproducible Results in which the authors debated whether dinosaurs were warm- or cold-blooded. As I recall they concluded that the beasts must have been cold-blooded because the entire surface of the earth would have been covered in many metres of dino-dung if they were warm-blooded! I tried to find the article on Google, but had no luck. If any reader can find it please send it to me and of course post it on the replies page of this blog.

On a more serious note, Rowe did not once mention the ear-flapping behaviour of elephants and I have no idea what the ears of his Edmontosaurus dinosaur would have looked like. Ear flapping is a vital part of the cooling strategy of today’s elephants. About 30 years ago the pioneering wildlife veterinarian Dr. ToniHarthoorn whom I worked with in my Kenya days told me of an experiment he did that shows an interesting component of that behaviour. He implanted thermistors in the artery and vein at the ear base and compared the temperatures of the blood in both vessels when the ears were still or waving. There was almost no difference between them until the waving began. When they moved there was a marked drop in the venous temperature as the blood returned to the body. Sadly time has eroded the actual figure from my now 71-year old brain, but a figure of 10 degree C keeps trying to assert itself.

Certainly, when I worked on elephants in Kenya and Rwanda we routinely poured water over the ears and flapped them while the animals were immobilized. You can even see evidence of this on my website under >photography>elephant, rhino, hippo (picture 25 of 30). Here is that photo, to save you chasing it down.

Did the ingenious masks that Mike Rowe designed to measure metabolic activity allow the ears to move? Without this component of the research I have to wonder if it is valid.

Sincerely,

Jerry Haigh

Wildlife veterinarian, Author, Storyteller.

Efforts to Stop the Ivory Crisis

There have been a few concerted efforts to get the Chinese people onside about the devastation being wreaked on Africa’s elephants. It’s an idea that may have come a little late, but has at least come. It is to use Chinese media to relay the information. One story that appeared on Facebook showed renowned elephant researcher and advocate Ian Douglas-Hamilton riding with Chinese journalists in the back of a safari vehicle as they rode through Samburu National Reserve.

Kenya’s Daily Nation news organization has joined the efforts. In an online article a Tourism ministry spokesman was quoted after speaking to the reporters.

“We have a beautiful country with beautiful animals. But we have a problem with poaching and soon we won’t have these animals,” the ministry’s deputy secretary, Mr Patrick Gakure, told the reporters.

The response was encouraging. The delegation promised to inform people at home.

“We would love to make Kenya the Number One destination for Chinese tourists. We have a large population of 1.3 billion, and if just one per cent of this visit Kenya, that means very many people,” Mr Aaron Sze, the chairman of Glamorous-Kenya, a Chinese marketing and travel agency, said.

At the ”consumer” end it appears that Yao Ming, the iconic and very popular basketball star is making an impact.

An email that came to me from Zach Weismann of WildAid on April 16^th was headlined:

Yao Ming Says No to Ivory and Rhino Horn.  

Photo credit Liu Ranran

With the message was a picture of the star at a table with several other folks backed by a huge banner. I have included the picture, taken by Liu Ranran here. The email is too long to reproduce in a blog and I could not find a useful link to it, but it sends a message of hope. Three organizations are involved in the efforts. They are WildAid, the African Wildlife Foundation, and Save The Elephants.

The email provides results of two surveys conducted in China. They are both revealing and chilling. A survey conducted in November of 2012 in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou by the Chinese research company, HorizonKey, found that:

•   More than half of the nearly 1,000 participants (over 50%) do not think elephant poaching is common;

•   34%, or one in three respondents, believe ivory is obtained from natural elephant mortality;

•   Only 33% of all participants believe elephants are poached for their tusks; and

•   94% of residents agree the “Chinese government should impose a ban on the ivory trade.”

Meanwhile, a similar survey conducted by HorzionKey in the same three major Chinese cities on rhino horn perceptions found that:

•   66% of all participants, that is two out of every three respondents, are not aware that rhino horn comes from poached rhinos;

•   Nearly 50% believed rhino horn can be legally purchased from official stores; and

•   95% of residents agree the “Chinese government should take stricter action to prevent use of rhino horns.”

The media can no doubt make Chinese people more aware of the issues, but it is the two figures at the end of the surveys that are chilling. They indicate that only 94% and 95% of people think that stricter action is needed. As the population of China is about 1.3 billion that means that something like 78 million DO NOT THINK THAT SUCH ACTION IS NEEDED. That is over twice the population of Canada.

There is another and very sorry side to this story that comes out of Kenya. It has to do with the penalties of ivory smuggling.

There is no doubt that the fines handed down to ivory traffickers in Kenya would not even qualify as a slap on the wrist. Paula Kahumbu is the Executive Director of Wildlife Direct. She is a powerful conservation voice and active on Twitter (you can follow her @paulakahumbu). She has reported on a case that was tried on April 19. The accused was a Vietnamese man named Nguyen Viet Truong Phong. He pleaded guilty. The magistrate fined the man a total of Ksh 40,000. The ivory he was trafficking was worth Ksh 5.7 million. To save you the bother of figuring out these numbers in dollars here they are. The value: $70,000. The fine: $489. He was released after paying the fine.

No wonder Paula wrote “I drive home in a state of shock. I feel devastated. No matter how much we invest in anti-poaching and dealing, no matter how many more poachers, dealers, traffickers we arrest, it makes no difference. The courts are letting them off with miniscule fines.”

This was not the only ridiculous fine. Another Facebook posting, this one from a group called Elephant Advocacy reported that Chinese National Tian Yi, was arrested at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport and pleaded guilty to possession of 439 pieces of worked ivory weighing 16.6 kg; ivory which might fetch as much as USD$16,000 in China. The Magistrate fined him a paltry KSH.30,000/- which works out to less than USD $350. It is clear that the problem of enforcement is now with the Kenyan courts of law.

Kenya’s new president Uhuru Kenyatta made a recent speech about the need for greater awareness of his country’s wildlife heritage, but nothing has yet emerged from that plea. Paula Kahumbu finished her piece with this

 

Today’s ruling was a wake-up call for all of us. It is going to take more than nice speeches by His Excellency President Uhuru Kenyatta to turn this situation around. Otherwise, our elephants are doomed.

Anohter Yao Ming poster, but I could not find a name to credit

Let’s hope that Yao Ming’s efforts can push those numbers way way up. 100%?

Wouldn’t that be nice.

Rhino anti poaching efforts

Photo on Facebook. Not credited to a spcific photogrpher, but not mine.

Followers of this blog site should not think that the rhino and elephant slaughter going on in Africa has stopped. It may well be getting worse, and nobody is suggesting that the situation is improving. There has not been an actual quote of numbers of either species taken in the last month or so, but the last figure I read indicated that rhino were dying at the hands of poachers at a rate of slightly over two a day. One educated guess states that the mid-April figure is 200 animals this year.  Of course these are just two of the most charismatic of the charismatic megafauna that are under threat across Africa.

So, what has been happening on the anti-poaching front and on the protection and consumption end of the rhino horn chain? I’ll take a closer look at the ivory part of the story soon.

On April 4th there was an on line report in the Guardian from the David Smith about an alternative attempt to curtail the trade by inserting potent poisons and a pink dye into the horns of living rhino. This was only occurring in one private game reserve, the Sabi Sand, which, on its eastern border abuts the world-famous Kruger National Park.

The Sabi Sand Game Reserve is injecting non-lethal chemical mixtures into rhino's horns.           Photograph: David Smith/Sabi Sand Game Reserve

This was picked up by the Smithsonian on line magazine.

As the horn itself is inert and grows upwards at a steady rate this poses no risk to the rhino (other than the risks involved in immobilization). Of course, as the horn is worn down by rubbing the poison and dye will only reside in the top parts.

“Consumers of the powdered horn in Asia risk becoming seriously ill from ingesting a so-called medicinal product, which is now contaminated with a non-lethal chemical package," said Andrew Parker, chief executive of the Sabi Sand Wildtuin Association, a group of private landowners in Mpumalanga province.

Apparently the insertion of the poison is not illegal, and those closest to the issue, like Tom Milliken of the wildlife trade monitoring network called TRAFFIC was reported as saying “it could act as a deterrent in areas where it is highly publicised but "is impractical in situations involving free-ranging animals in large areas, places like Kruger national park with 20,000 sq km. Thus, like dehorning, it probably has the effect of displacing poaching intensity to other areas, not stopping it altogether."

I have suggested before in this blog series that the whole surge in rhino horn “medical” properties is being driven by snake oil salesmen out to make a buck (lots of bucks) and the consequences be damned. If such a person was to see the pink dye there would be little to stop him or her from either countering the dye colour or selling it on as “special.” It would need a major media campaign in Vietnam to make people, aware of what is happening. I’m not betting my house on that.

Another fascinating little report came to me from a Linkedin post by Amber Dyson. She had spent 3 months in Vietnam in 2012 with the Endangered Asian Species Trust which is an organization that funds the Dao Tien Rescue Centre in Southern Vietnam. 

She wrote "I was in Vietnam carrying out research for my MSc dissertation on the use of animals in traditional medicine. Rhino horn was by far the most valued and the most desired though incredibly hard to source especially after the extinction of rhinos in Vietnam earlier that year."

She reported about a man who purchased some horn because he had cancer. The horn did not help (of course), but his status in the community rose markedly because he had been able to get hold of such a precious commodity. It had cost him the equivalent of three years salary!

Elephants and CITES, stumble or small step?

ISBN 1-904440-38-X

In his 2004 book What I Tell You Three Times is True Ian Parker had a whole chapter titled CITES – THE UNWORKABLE TREATY. The acronym CITES stands for The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora. It was first signed in 1973 by representatives of 51 nations and by 1979 there were 527 listed species. In 2004 Ian wrote “Now, after an orgy of silliness, over 50,000 plant and animal species are on CITES lists, each having to be recognized by its scientific name...” By 2013 178 nations had signed on. The is one problem, as Ian wrote. Nobody seems to have calculated the financial cost of this unwieldy bureaucracy. 

Ian had been a game warden in the very early days of the Kenya Game Department and wrote several books about the country’s wildlife. He was particularly knowledgeable about elephants and wrote two books about them and their tusks, so coveted by humans through the ages. The first, in 1983, was Ivory Crisis, co-authored with the wonderful photographer Mohamed Amin. Twenty-one years later came “Three Times”, with its subtitle Conservation, Ivory, History and Politics. That just about covers anything one can think of to do with Ivory.

It is not as if Ian was an outside observer of CITES. He was commissioned to study the ivory trade in 1979 and wrote a detailed report about his findings. He had attended CITES meetings in 1981 and 1983 as a representative of legitimate ivory traders. He came away from those meetings gravely disillusioned and wrote of the 1983 gathering that “the only thing of use to come out of the conference was the green plastic briefcase with the CITES logo (the copyright for which was paid for by the ivory traders).”

There is a newish wrinkle to the elephant story. The trading of ivory has become big business. If the many recent posts on the subject are right ivory (along with a wide range of other wildlife products) has joined the ranks of drugs, weapons, and human trafficking as a “matter of interest” to organized crime.

As any who follow the elephant and ivory story are well aware the recent CITES meeting in Bangkok produced a less than firm result on the ivory trade and matters concerning elephant conservation. If there we any positives they were about the testing of ivory for DNA, which can give an accurate picture of its source.

There are several articles and blogs in major outlets such as Nature, The Scientific American, The online Guardian, The New York Times and social media sites such as Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter.

  

This one, from a TV station out of New York called New Tang Dynasty (NTD) headlined China’s Demand for Ivory Fueling Elephant Poaching was particularly interesting because it claims many Chinese people believe that ivory falls out and can be collected, a bit like deer antler.  NTD with correspondents in over 70 cities world-wide has a mission “to bring truthful and uncensored information into and out of China; to restore and promote traditional Chinese culture; and to facilitate mutual understanding between the East and West.” 

Reporter, film maker and activist Bryan Christy posted a remarkable letter, dated March 7^th 2013 and signed by Robert Hepworth, the former chair of the CITES standing committee on elephants and ivory trade. It was sent to every delegate at the Bangkok meeting and opened with “I write to you to express my deep concern about the crisis facing elephants and the discussions and negotiations in Bangkok.” He goes on to urge them to “implement an urgent, indefinite and comprehensive ban on ivory trade including domestic markets.”

So, was a ban forthcoming? The simple answer is No. As one on-line forum  put it in an article titled CITES: Rhetoric and tiptoeing around elephant poaching. “The actual outcome was far short of what was expected and, indeed, what was needed to secure the fate of elephants.”

In what was clearly a cop-out, or some sort of milk-sop compromise the delegates warned eight countries to watch their step. Damian Carrington of the Guardian wrote “Stop Ivory Poaching or Face Sanctions, nations warned at CITES.” These are countries where ivory grows: Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda; countries through which ivory is smuggled: Malaysia, Vietnam and the Philippines; and destination countries: Thailand and China. The threat of sanctions are more or less a political “stand in the corner you naughty child” response from the bad old days of primary school.

With its huge carving industry, including government-sponsored factories, China is not like to do more than pay lip service to any such “warning.” As they flex their mighty economic muscles in so many fields I cannot see them taking any meaningful notice of the CITES position. Thailand’s Prime Minister made a statement that at first appeared to support the ban, but Bryan Christy tweeted the following that tells a different story: Thai PM did NOT commit to end ALL ivory trade according to this #cites doc. Only ILLEGAL trade pic.twitter.com/fONfeNvTNg

It may be that the CITES members were scared off by terrifyingly powerful crime syndicates, cow-towing to the might of the Chinese or perhaps they were simply re-enforcing Parker’s assertion about an unworkable treaty.

There are some bright spots in this sorry tale, but they have not yet become incandescent. People in Kenya have begun to realize that without elephants their tourist industry will take a hammering. There have been street rallies in Nairobi and at least one member of the public has garnered news headlines with his long walks.

Perhaps the brightest of all appears in a brief but inspiring segment of the National Geographic film Battle for the Elephants. Richard Bonham, who owns a safari lodge in the Chyulu hills, right next to Amboseli National Park founded the Big LifeFoundation. It was not Bonham’s first venture into conservation. He has been closely involved with lion conservation for some years. From all appearances he used the successful model of employing local Masai people to protect the lions into a similar program for elephants. In the movie he describes how 280 rangers are employed and gives statistics on the carnage, comparing the loss of 16 elephants in 18 months under his scheme with the 30 per day in Tanzania.

On the other hand a smooth and urbane minister in the Tanzanian government denied any knowledge of illegal ivory sales and stated it would be “impossible.” He was being interviewed by Aidan Hartley for that same National Geographic film. He expressed shock and was “really surprised” when Hartley came back and showed him how easy it had been to find illegal vendors and set up a purchase.  

It will take street activists, like those walkers in Nairobi, to get action at the supply end. At the consumer end one can only hope that stars like Yao Ming and young people like CeliaHo, about whom I have written before, will be heard.  Celia has to juggle school studies (she is 14) but is active on Facebook. I have other ivory-related blogs as well. 

Both Aidan Hartley and Bryan Christy tried to give a positive spin on their grim story and Hartley ended with this statement.

“We shouldn’t give up hope, but it is a race against time. Because at the moment we’re losing elephant populations at such a fast rate that by the time the Chinese middle classes wake up, by the time that they’ve stopped buying all this stuff, it’ll be too late.

Christy hopes to return to China in twenty years and shake hands with the people he met during his undercover assignment.

With organized crime in the game I am not optimistic.

Two Sides to the Rhino Horn Trade

There are two sides to every question, right? Of course it is an old cliché, but one would think that when it comes to rhino horn trade the answer would be an emphatic NO WAY!

Well, as far as some members of the South African Game Farmers Association are concerned there are indeed two sides.

As we wait for the CITES decision on the ivory trade the situation with rhino poaching has continued to deteriorate.

Here is a summary of some facts as outlined by noted rhino expert Dr. Pete Morkel about recent developments in South Africa.

"South Africa has lost another 24 rhino since last week," the CEO of SA National Parks (SANParks) David Mabunda said in a statement.

"The Kruger National Park remains the hardest hit, with 15 rhino being poached for their horn since 20 February 2013."

According to the latest statistics by SANParks the Kruger National Park has had 107 poaching since the beginning of the year. Across South Africa 146 have been poached so far this year, which brought the total to 1,595 over the past four years. Each year the number of poached animals rises. And at over two animals per day in 2013 the trend is likely to continue. 

To those of us outside South Africa this horror story can be simply stopped, or at least curtailed by simple strokes of the several pens. If CITES would ban all forms of rhino horn trade and then help importing countries to enforce the ban, the trade would dwindle. The major importers are in Asia, with Vietnam leading the way, but Korea and China are well in the mix.

Vietnam and South Africa have signed an MOU, but as has been pointed out, MOUs are probably not even worth the paper they are written on if the parties have no intention of honouring them.

I have written before about the snake oil sales pitch in Vietnam and the claim that the stuff (merely keratin) is a cure for cancer. A ridiculous new claim has arisen. Derek Mead has written that rhino horn is now being used as party drug to cure hangovers.

Mead has picked up on a Global Post article of August 2012  headlined Forget cocaine: Rhino horn is the new drug of status. 

Picture of a woman grinding rhino horn in a specially designed bowl was on Mead's post, but no photographer is named.

Erin Conway-Smith, the author of that article states that “Tom Milliken, a rhino expert with TRAFFIC who has worked extensively in Asia and Africa, said that in Vietnam, offering your friends rhino horn at a party has become a fashionable way to show wealth and status.”

She goes on: “The TRAFFIC report describes the disturbing phenomenon of “rhino horn touts” stalking the corridors at hospitals, seeking out desperate patients with cancer.”

Sounds to me like a new form of the much-despised ambulance-chasing lawyer.

One Vietnamese news website described rhino horn wine as “the alcoholic drink of millionaires.”

Mead has another thought-provoking post on the Motherboard site. In this one he is relating his own direct experience when he logged into an underground message board in “search of rhinoceros horn.” He was soon offered some. He reported that some vendors have even used Facebook to make sales! The price of horn is now in the $90,000 per kg range.

This black rhino bull was found wandering Zimbabwe's Savé Valley Conservancy after poachers shot it several times and hacked off both its horns. Veterinarians euthanized the animal because its shattered shoulder could no longer support its weight.  In the past six years poachers have killed more than a thousand African rhinos for their treasured horns. Photograph by Brent Stirton / National Geographic

It would seem that this is a simple issue. Stop the slaughter, stop the trade. Amazingly there is another side to this story, and it has gone under the radar.

Despite the carnage, which has escalated since the cancer cure claim emerged in Vietnam, the numbers of white rhino are on the increase. This is because the South African game farming industry has done a good job of caring for them and that they have bred successfully.

White rhino in Meru National Park, Kenya.

A hundred years ago there were fewer than twenty southern white rhino left anywhere. Their recovery from the brink is generally attributed to two men. One was Frederick Vaughan-Kirby, a hunter turned park ranger. The other was Ian Player, brother of the golfer Gary, who was involved in early translocation efforts that have led to the species being found in 17 different countries and many other areas of Africa.  There are several thousand world-wide, but most of them are in South Africa.

Some members of the South African Game Farmers Association see the possible legal sale of rhino horn as a real opportunity for income, especially at today’s prices. They stress legal.

Rhino immobilization is not difficult. Since the days when I immobilized about 150 of them for translocation the techniques and drug regimes have improved. In the hands of experienced veterinarians losses are minimal. It really would be no problem to dehorn rhinos every two or three years (rhino horn grows continuously, just like fingernails) and take the harvested product into the market.

We should accept (albeit heartily dislike) the fact that rhino horn is now considered a commodity in the orient, and that major organized crime syndicates are involved in the trade. If legal trade were permitted it might take the pressure off the free-ranging animals in parks.

However, Dr. Morkel thinks that “legal sale would be a fiasco.”  

There is no doubt that wealthy rhino owners would become even wealthier if this happens, but Dr. Morkel thinks this may be a pipe-dream for the rest. As he put it to me the wealthy ones "will probably have the resources to protect their rhino but as for the rhino in the smaller SA private reserves, SA government parks/reserves and other African and Asian range states I have serious doubts whether legal trade will do them any favours. Legal trade can only work if there is tight control and that just does not exist in the range states or consumer countries. There is also this myth that all this money will come flowing straight back into rhino security. They are dreaming. It did not happen with the money from the legal sale of ivory so why should it be any different with rhino horn?"

On the other hand here is a model for the legalization thinking. Prohibition lasted from 1920 to 1933 in the USA. It failed.

As I said, two sides.

Indian Rhino: Conservation and Poaching Threats

The news about rhinos in India is less depressing than the stories coming out of Africa. Most of the country’s rhinos live in the north-east state of Assam and are held in relatively small national parks that lie along the Bramapuhtra river.

The range of the Indian Rhino, aka the Greater one-Horned Rhinoceros once covered a vast swath of land that stretched across what is known as the Indo-Gangetic plain. 

As this map, taken from a Wiki site shows with the tiny reddish dots, they are now confined to protected populations in Nepal, Bhutan and India’s state of Assam, where about two-thirds of the total number of about 3000 live (claims vary, but not by more than10%).

In an interesting historical note by one RC Beavan of the Bengal Survey the status of this creature was nicely summed up, albeit in 1865, in a journal called the Intellectual Observer. 

He wrote that it “has been driven by the progress of civilization further and further from the haunts of men, until now it is to be found only in the dense untrodden jungles which skirt the base of the Eastern Himalayas, and the branches of that chain which penetrate Assam.”  

I was particularly struck by his spelling of the name of the major river of the region. He called it the Burrampooter.

Of the many images of this live armoured tank available I chose this belligerent-looking character, a photo taken by Yathin S. Krishnappa and available on a Creative Commons  site.  

While poaching is definitely a threat, a surprising cause of mortality comes from the river. Every year it floods in spring when the snows of the Himalayas melt and many rhinos drown before they can leave the riparian swamps and head for the hills.

In a short NDTV news clip video dated 28 Sept 2012 titled FLOODS, POACHING KAZARINGA’S DOUBLE TROUBLE the recent poaching of three rhinos in two days was compared the drowning of some 700 animals in a previous flood seasons. It may be that 700 is a cumulative number, but that is not clear in the news clip. But flooding is very definitely a problem. A recent (Jan 2013) DW report talks of the death of 50 rhinos and also mentions that 30 of them drowned in 2012.

One of the stranger elements of that same NDTV news clip is that the face of a poached rhino, presumably with its horn chopped off, has been blurred as if it were the genital regions of a human.   

More disconcerting than this ultimate homage to the PC world is that two of the rhinos were still alive. This implies that someone immobilized them.  A vet? Maybe. It would not be the first time, as members of our profession have been implicated in some such activities in South Africa. Sad.

In a January 2011 report in the online Save the Rhino magazine the numbers are reported to have “recovered from fewer than 200 animals in the early 1990s to more than 2,850 today.”

The story goes on to relate how translocations from nearby parks is helping to spread the load.

“The translocations are the backbone of the ambitious Indian Rhino Vision (IRV) 2020 – a partnership among the government of Assam, the International Rhino Foundation, the World Wide Fund for Nature, the Bodoland Territorial Council, and the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service – that aims to attain a population of 3,000 wild rhinos in seven of Assam's protected areas by the year 2020.”

If you have time you can watch a twenty-minute Youtube video that tells the same story of the rhino and the translocations from Pobitora Wildlife Sanctuary and the nearby Kazaringa National Park. Pobitora is really tiny, in rhino terms. It covers only 39 square kilometres and something obviously had to be done. The video is a compilation of previous shorter posts, the first translocation having taken place in 2008.

In that same DW report there is mention that in Kazaringa NP, home to over 90% of the state’s rhinos they “lost 18 animals to poachers last year. Another four were killed in the Pobitora, Orang and Manas national parks.”

As far as the rhinos in Bhutan and Nepal are concerned the animal is not safe in either country. A report in an on-line news letter called Green Fudge dated 24 June 2010 there is an account of the poaching of 24 rhinos in the preceding eleven months. These came from a population of about 400 animals.

Are the reported different poaching rates in Africa and the Indian sub-continent real or imagined? 

It is impossible to tell from local websites and reports, but there is one possible explanation. 

As I wrote in my Rhino Poaching and Possible Solutions blog of Jan 3^rd there is one major difference. In some Indian parks there are two field staff per square kilometre. In parts of Africa a single ranger is expected to patrol thirty-three square km!