Rhino killing
in Africa continues more or less unabated.
The “official” figure for 2012 is
633 rhinos poached, the majority in South
Africa’s flagship Kruger National
Park. This is likely to be a low-ball number. One source dated in
mid-December has suggested 699. I would not be a bit surprised if the true
number was well over 700.
Then of
course comes the question of how many of these victims were pregnant females.
This poignant picture, sent by Dr. CR “Bossie” Boshoff to all members of a
wildlife vet listserv shows a tiny foetus found in the uterus of one such
animal.
Here is
another pair of photos, these ones from Dr. Lin-Mari de Klerk-Lorist the State
Veterinary office in the Kruger.
The lactating cow was already pregnant, and her
accompanying 2.5 year-old calf was killed. Three animals down in one nasty
raid!
There
are reports that about 600 people have been arrested in connection with this
crime, but how many of them will actually be found guilty, or receive
sentences that will send the preventive message?
The recent sentence of
40 years given to Chumlong
Lemtongthai
might have some effect, but it might not. Life sentences and the death penalty have not
stopped murders.
As I have written
before, paltry sentences have been quite useless in Kenya and I still wonder
how many links in the money chain there are so that the actual real cash goes
to some high-placed politician or a person with those sorts of contacts. When
the price of horn exceeds the price of gold by a factor of two, temptation is
enormous.
Forty years ago, as Ian Parker
wrote in his book What I Tell You Three
Times is True, the president’s wife was a major player in the export of
ivory. Nobody was going to be able to stop that.
The critical thing to
remember is that so far any and all attempts to stop the poaching have more or
less failed, at least in parts of Africa. It would seem that an alternative
strategy and thinking process is needed. If not an alternative, at least an
effective parallel one.
On Dec 16 Robert Godec, the United States ambassador to Kenya, wrote a 134 word op-ed piece in Kenya’s Daily Nation
newspaper titled “We need to work together to save
Africa’s threatened wildlife from greedy poachers.”
His most crucial
sentences were as follows:
“And most
importantly, we need to persuade individuals to stop buying ivory, rhino horn,
and other products that require the slaughter of wildlife.
In short, we
need to galvanise bold, comprehensive, worldwide action against poaching. We
need to stop the organised and criminal slaughter of wildlife.”
In the Oct-Dec issue of
Swara
the magazine arm of the East African Wildlife Society there are two
articles on the subject of rhino poaching. The first is an opinion piece by Kenneth K. Coe, who styles himself as
an Asian American. He is chairman of the Nature Conservancy's volunteer Africa council.
He makes the point that we are wasting
our time if we try to change thousands of years of TCM culture. We are also
wasting our time if we target the heart of the rhino horn user by appealing to
a sort of inner "love" of rhinos. The real approach, he suggests, is
to get at the brain of the users by telling them that they are being scammed or
"defrauded by rumor-mongering criminals and
others on the take.'" His key paragraph starts like this:
This is
the message that needs to circulate in Asia. "You are being conned! Who do
you think is spreading the cancer cure rumour? It's the rhino horn dealers!
Such a rumour is slap in the face to TCM, a 3,000 year old art of healing.
Another way of putting
this is that buyers are being sold useless goods by what used to be called snake
oil salesmen. They were vilified and run out of town by the (usually)
white-hatted sheriff in many a spaghetti western. Let’s get that vilification
onto the television, radio and print media in Vietnam, where the cancer cure nonsense seems to be strongest.
In another highly
relevant article in the same issue, Esmond
Martin and Lucy Vigne have a piece
titled Strategies To Decrease Rhino
Poaching In Africa: Our Personal View. These two have tracked and followed
the rhino and ivory story for three decades. They provide a comprehensive
figure of rhino poaching, covering the period 2007 to 2011, of at least 1370
animals. Add the 2012 figures and we are two thousand and counting!
In their article Martin
and Vigne compare the protection of rhino in the Indian sub-continent with the
apparent failures in some parts of Africa.
The bottom line is that
where the poaching is less rampant there is a more coordinated effort by
government. Villagers on the fringes of the Indian parks are helped with all
sorts of agricultural enterprises and far more money is spent per km2
than in Africa. In a couple of parks there are two field staff per square
kilometre. Of course this leads to far more buy-in by villagers and if poachers
are arrested and tried the local judiciary “usually
gives sentences of several years in prison that act as an adequate deterrent.”
In a few African
countries (Namibia, Swaziland) there
has been much less poaching, which can probably be ascribed to much lower human
densities than in South Africa as well as lower rhino numbers, stiff sentences
for those found guilty, and greater
buy-in by local communities. One of the problems that plagues the Kruger
efforts is the huge size of the park (at 20,000 km2 it is about the
same area as Wales or about four
times the size of Prince Edward Island) and
the much lower density of staff (one person per 33 km2). On top of
that there is a more-or-less open border with Mozambique all along the eastern boundary of the park. As Martin
and Vigne report “There have been a number of arrests
of poachers, but overall intelligence and cooperation with official across the
border has been inadequate, and Mozambique’s penalties for wildlife crimes are
ineffectual.”
It's an interesting
read, accompanied by several telling pictures, including ones of fake rhino
horns for sale in China.
