Rhino Horn and Bling

-->In my post of 17^th August I referred to a fine piece of undercover detective work carried out by Karl Amman. It is titled Hanoi Connection, The Rhino Horn Mafia. In this 26 minute video he shows how the rhino horn trade has exploded and gone mainstream in Hanoi. So much so that there are large quantities of false horn now available on the market as demand has grown. 
I had thought that this was driven by the TCM market, with the added extra component of an alleged used for dealing with hangovers and so-called rhino horn parties at which the stuff is ground on specially designed plates, suspended in fluid and drunk.

Of course this moves the use of the horn into the conspicuous consumption field, and Karl has very recently taken his investigation a lot further. 

Rhino horn is now used as bling. 

His full story is up on his website and will also appear in the East Africna Wildlife Society's flagship magazine Swara. For lovers of wildlife stories, and an edgy apporoach to today's issues, you could not do better than subscribe. Here are a couple of Karl's pictures from the bling story.

A horn shop in Hanoi at left and a
 transaction underway at right

I decided to find out a bit more about bling and of course the first place to look was on Google. I knew it is a word that has only come into the lexicon in recent times. I had not realized how recent. One source states that it is of Jamaican origin and was first used by the Silvertones in their December 2002 song Bling Bling Christmas. It is such a good word that it is now in common use throughout the English-speaking world. Various definitions are offered. A simple one is Flash and sparkle; glamour. Another puts it this way: The word "bling" refers to any unnecessary accumulation of metal or jewellery which impresses the simple-minded.

I fell to thinking about bling in a wider context. Of course there are plenty of recent references to things like fancy engagement rings and so on, but the truth is that humans were using bling long before it became a word. 

Witness the widespread used of animal parts by people all over the world for who knows how long.

Joy Adamson’s fascinating 1967 book The Peoples of Kenya has dozens of her photos and paintings showing tribesmen dressed in an extraordinary array of skins, feathers, bones and horns. Many of the original works have been shown in Nairobi’s National Museum, once known as the Coryndon Museum.

Ostrich feathers were not only worn by Kenyan and other African warriors. They became a fashion statement for western women and ostrich famers of the late 19^th and very early 20^th centuries profited mightily. Then came the motorcar. Most cars were open to the elements and the industry took a hit. 

In my copy of the 1982 The Elk of North America is a picture of a beautiful young girl of the Dakota Sioux Nation nation who is wearing a ceremonial dress covered in approximately 1700 canine teeth (aka bugle teeth) of a wapiti.

Some of the tribesmen of Papua New Guinea are famous for wearing all sorts of bling. Perhaps the most well-known are the bones through their nasal septa and the Koteka or penis sheath worn by many, mainly highland, tribes. 

Last weekend my wife and I watched a PBS movie made by Ken Burns. It is titled The National Parks: America's Best Idea and tells a remarkable story. The bling issue arose there as well, in a way I knew nothing about. A hundred and ten years ago egrets in the Florida Everglades were shot in unimaginable numbers - 5 million a year. All the feathers, and some whole birds, were used to decorate women's hats! 

"Wanda in wild feathers." A photo from the early 1900s

Almost 95% of the species were wiped out and the feathers for the hats had to be obtained during the nesting season.

The movie’s narrator recounts how a naturalist, going for a stroll in New York, saw 542 feathered hats with material from 40 different species.

Numerous attempts were made to halt the slaughter and an Audubon Society campaign failed. Only when a government congressman named John F Lacey got something done did things improve! 

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Is the use of rhino horn bracelet worn opposite a $15,000 Rolex watch (and costing about as much) just the latest manifestation of an ancient human trait?

Tame cheetah and an attack

Last week a report appeared on my basic news home page (BBCnews) about an attack on a British woman named Violet D’Mello. She had been mauled by a cheetah and some difficult-to-watch video footage was also out there. The story was picked up by many media outlets all over the world. It’s gory and so on, but it does have a happyish ending. Despite nasty injuries to her head, particularly to her eyes, Mrs. D’Mello survived and by now will be well on the way to recovery from the physical injuries.

I’m not here to recap the unfortunate story, but I am interested in the whole business of keeping wild animals as “pets.” It is something I have real problems with, for a variety of reasons.

Cheetahs have been “domesticated” for at least three thousand years. Tame cheetahs were used as hunting animals during the seventeenth and eighteenth Dynasty (1550-1292 BC) in Egypt.  The best-known examples date from the time of the Moghul (or Mughal) emperors in India during the 16^th and 17^th centuries AD. They had large numbers of these beautiful cats that they used for hunting, especially of the Indian blackbuck.

This picture, in the public domain, was painted by the famous Englishman, George Stubbs, best known for this many depictionsof horses. 

 

EmperorAkbar Hunting with Cheetahs – 

Akbar the Great (1556 to 1605) was reputed to have about a thousand cheetahs tamed in this way, although it is not clear if they were all owned at one time.  Adult cheetahs, that had already learned hunting skills from their mothers, were preferred to cubs, which took a lot longer to train. The cheetahs were blindfolded and “carted.” When potential quarry was seen the blindfold was removed and the hunt was on. It all sounds very much like a falconry exercise. This picture of Akbar, which I got from an intersting site on the web here

dates from the 16th century and shows him with a large retinue in attendance.The cheetahs are hunting gazelles and blackbuck.

 

During my intern year I used to see a tame cheetah at the small animal clinic at the vet school Kenya. It was really tame and would purr away as one examined it.  I’ve told the full story in my book Wrestling With Rhinos (http://www.jerryhaigh.com/book/). 

Joy Adamson and Pippa, photo taken by Andrew Botta

 I also had to deal with a tame cheetah named Pippa that conservationist Joy Adamson “owned” and claimed to be returning to the wild. That is open to question, as she did not want to lose contact with it (something she wrote in her book The Spotted Sphinx) and continued to feed it an inappropriate diet even when it had shown that it could hunt successfully and had mated with a wild cheetah and was raising a littler. That story is also told in WWR.

There do not appear to be any other accounts of a cheetah attacking a human, so I do wonder if an important element of Mrs. D’Mello’s experience was the presence of children. I have watched, with fascination and concern, as all three of Africa’s big cats have shown an unhealthy interest in small children. I wonder if they simply see them as a bite-sized snack in some sort of atavistic return to the time when humans would have been one source of prey on the open plains. 

My first experience with this phenomenon was in George Adamson’s camp at Mughwango, in Kenya’s Meru National Park. One of the several lionesses came over as we sat and drank a coffee with George. Luckily we were inside his somewhat secure chicken-wire enclosure, part of which you can see here on the left in this paicture taken by colleague and friend Roger Windsor. Two lions are asleep on and beneath the platform in the centre. The big cat simply stared us down, concentrating entirely on the three-year-old daughter of our friends. Her eyes had that scary Yumyum look.   

 

Another of Roger Windsor's photos of George.

It is not widely known that even George’s very tame lions would occasionally maul and in one case kill a human. George was himself attacked on one occasion.

A few years later I was with friends at the Pretoria Zoo in South Africa and their small daughter was sitting on her mother’s shoulders. As we stood by the cheetah pen one of the cats came over, stretched up the wire and took a very close look at the two-year old from about a metre away. It was spooky.