A Lion's False Teeth

Last week I received a copy of an email sent to the Saskatoon Zoo Society, of which I was a member for many years in the 70s and 80s. A 14 year-old boy in Winnipeg explained how he has been told stories by his grandad about a lion. As Zachary wrote it “He used to be a professor of dentistry at the University of Saskatchewan during the 70’s and 80’s. He always used to tell me how you came to him seeking his help to make the world’s first set of dentures for a lion.

That was not quite how I recalled the case, but I have the advantage of a set of photos taken that day and a short article I wrote for the Journal of Zoo Animal Medicine (as it was in those days).

George (the lion) lived in a small enclosure at the Forestry Farm Zoo in Saskatoon. When I arrived in the city from Kenya in 1975 there had not been any sort of veterinary program there and no animals had ever been vaccinated for anything. This is only relevant to George the lion’s situation because he hated me with a passion. After only one injection, given when a keeper fed him some meaty tidbits through the page wire fence, he would not let me near him. He recognized me at a distance, even when I tried to disguise myself. On one occasion he even picked me out in a crowd when I took my family to the zoo and carried my then two-year-old son on my shoulders. He must surely have recognized my face, as my gait and shape would have been markedly altered that day.

So, when the keepers told me that George was off his feed, and had only been toying with the fresh chunks of meat and bone that he had been tempted with over the last couple of days, I knew we had to take action. With some planning we tricked the old lion. I went over to this pen, so of course he promptly headed to the other side, as far away from me as possible. Little did he know it but he was now in range for Stu, one of the team, to use my blowgun and get a drug cocktail into him.

Within a few minutes he was out cold so we could think about entering his pen, but not before checking that Queenie, the lioness with which he spent his days, was safely locked in the shelter. That part was simple, but we still took it very carefully. The first step was to bounce a rock of his backside. No reaction. On closer approach we could poke a long stick at his side. Still no reaction. 

Essential eye protection

 I checked his heart and breathing and then had a look at his mouth. 

Sore mouth, broken teeth. No wonder he was off his feed.

It was easy to see what the problem was. He had three broken canine teeth, the big ones that a lion uses to kill his prey. Two of them had nasty-looking pus-like material oozing out. No wonder he was of his feed. He must have been hurting.

I at once knew that I need some help with this one. By lunchtime I was back in my office at the WesternCollege of Veterinary Medicine and I had had an excited response after my call to the dental college across campus. Two mornings later we were back at the zoo. By we, I mean me and three dentists. This is almost certainly two more dentists than were actually needed, but it is not every day that a chance like this would arise. Indeed one of them has been telling his grandson about the case some thirty-five years later.

Immobilization was much easier this time because the keeper staff had shut Queenie out of the shelter and George was within easy reach for his injection. The dental team soon had a cast made of George’s mouth and promised to get everything done as soon as possible. They began to discuss idea for making up a set of metal crowns. 

A wild lion with a broken tooth, in this case an incisor

We discussed the whys and wherefores of how George had broken his teeth. I had seen broken teeth in wild lions, and had learned that this was sometimes caused by biting at a hard bone, but it is a rare event. In George’s case it was almost certainly due to his biting at the wires around his cage and catching the rear, concave surfaces of his teeth. When he pulled back they got stuck and could break off. Apparently this was a recognized hazard for lions in captivity. 

Our third immobilization, for a much longer procedure, took place a few days later. Again, George was easy to approach in his shelter and the routines were simple.  

Out of the pen, off to the trailer

I checked his heart and breathing, and pretty soon we were carrying him to a waiting flatbed trailer where I administered some eye drops to protect his corneas and we put a towel over his head. From there we shifted a very sleepy lion into the zoo van and headed to the college. Once there another team joined us—the anesthesia team. These were the folks who would have to keep both George and all the people safe for a couple of hours. We did not exactly want him waking up mid-surgery!

Pipe cleaners do have other uses!

At this point I was more-or-less supernumerary. The dentists took over for the root canal procedure, for that is what was needed. Not just on one tooth, but on three. They had come fully prepared. None of their usual delicate instruments was going to be of much use. To clean out the infected tooth roots they used coping saw blades that they had picked up at a hardware store. Flushing the mess out of the root canals was easier. Instead of their normal fine equipment they used large veterinary needles, there was no shortage of those around. To dry everything up they had sterilized a whole bunch of pipe cleaners.

The brand new caps in place on the casts. Perfect fit!

Now came the really clever bit. The dentists had designed stainless steel tooth caps that had no concave surfaces. If George got at the wires again the teeth would simply slip off as he pulled.

With the canals and teeth dry and clean it was simply a case of applying the right sort of cement, albeit in much large quantities than any previous human patient, inserting the pins into the channels and letting everything dry.

Ready to roll! No chewing problems now.

George soon adapted to his new finery. His appetite returned, and he lived on for quite a few more trouble-free years. There was a brief interlude of an idea to rename him Jaws, after the nasty guy played by Richard Dawson Kiel in the James Bond movie The Spy Who Loved Me. That did not last.

A display item at the WCVM

George’s skull, with teeth in place, is now a part of the collection of bones and other bits in the WCVM’s anatomy department. The unusual skull appears every now and again on special display days. They were never strictly dentures, as Zachary has been told, but at the time they were indeed the world’s only set of capped lion’s teeth.

A favourite photo from the Serengeti. I did not chekc the teeth too closely, but they looked fine

Rhino Horn: To Ban or Not to Ban the Trade

As readers of this, and other blogs, FB and Twitter posts and the occasional piece of print media are well aware, rhino poaching has continued to escalate, somewhat like a slow tsunami, for the last five or six years. I have posted on this subject thirteen times since 2010.

Most of the increase in annual numbers has taken place in Africa and it is no surprise that the vast Kruger National Park has taken most of the hits. The numbers change from week to week, but it would seem that well over two animals a day are being taken out. The latest figure I have seen, for mid-June, was 428 dead rhino, 267 of them in the Kruger alone. One June 22 a South African National Parks report stated that 25 rhino had been killed in the Limpopo district in one week. 

A Linkedin group flying under the banner of The Wildlife Conservation Society has seen a considerable amount of traffic of late. There has been a lively debate about the pros and cons of lifting the ban of the trade in rhino horn.

There can be no doubt that the policing efforts in many places have not worked, or not worked as well as one might have hoped. These increases have come at substantial cost to governments and park managers. Ranger and military forces have been increased, sometimes by considerable numbers, but the poachers have persisted, and just like in other walks of life the “bad guys” are one step ahead of the forces of law and order. The CITES ban has simply not worked.

The protagonists of an open market and lifting of the ban have quoted scientific article titled A Market Solution For Preserving Biodiversity: The Black Rhino,  prepared in 1999 by Gardner Brown and David Layton.

The article was published in a book titled Protecting Endangered Species in the United States and edited by Jason F. Shogren and John Tschirhart.

The article contains a bunch of mathematical formulas, and maths is definitely not my strong suit. The very opposite. I recall (dimly) something about differential equations, but I have no idea what they do.

Much has changed since that paper was published and some of the assumptions are out of date. The new, and entirely false claim of the horn having cancer-cure properties was a clever marketing tool used by unscrupulous vendors in Vietnam. 

A woman grinding rhino horn in a specially designed bowl

Who could resist such a claim when we know that folks with cancer can be desperate for any sort of solution.  On top of that came the ridiculous claim that the stuff is a cure-all for hangovers, which led it to become a “fashion” tonic for the newly rich and upwardly mobile in Vietnam. Not bad for an overgrown fingernail!

On the price side, the Vietnamese marketing has driven the price to something close to double that of gold. Wow, my fingernails are not worth that much.

While many poachers have been killed and even more arrested, the carnage continues and the rangers are at constant risk. That they are willing to run that risk, the loss of their own lives, speaks volumes for them, and it is even sadder to realize that rangers, senior park and wildlife officials and military forces in some countries have been implicated in the poaching, rather than the efforts to stop it. For me personally, the saddest example of this lies in the country of my birth where, it is reported, that over 30 senior staff of the Kenya Wildlife Service have been suspended over allegations of complicity in poaching.

Thousands of words have been exchanged on the issue. Those who wish to see the ban lifted seem to come from the very considerable number of South African game ranchers who have successfully, and at no trivial cost, successfully bred rhinos on their properties. Nobody has provided actual numbers, but the ranchers obviously see the potential of the sale of horn into the oriental (mainly Vietnamese) market as being no different than the sale of any other commodity derived from a business venture. The only other sources of income for these ranchers are through tourism or livestock auctions. For those who wonder about the latter, they have been an integral part of the South African game ranch industry for at least twenty years. Ranchers have become expert at rounding up and transporting just about any species that one can ranch.

Among the arguments in favour of the legalization of trade one correspondent suggests that poachers could be taught to breed rhinos and harvest the horn every two years or so. The horn of a white rhino (the commonest species) grows at about 0.9 kg per year and at prices in the $60,000 per kg range that would mean a substantial income from just a few animals. The writer makes the point that the communities that engage in this enterprise would guard their assets with their lives.

Those who are against any form of legalization of the rhino horn trade point to the disastrous results of the lifting of the ivory ban by CITES. Nobody (except perhaps those who work within CITES) thinks that the partial lifting of the ban in 1997 has been anything but an utter catastrophe for elephants.  There is a lot of traffic on Internet sites about this mess, and Wikipedia has an interesting look at the long history  of this subject, but I’m trying to focus on the rhino issue here.

There have been some changes in the law and penalties for those who are caught poaching. The Kenya government recently changed their laws so that those found guilty might be fined up to $120,00 and prison terms of up to 15 years. This was quite a change form the previous fine of $480.

Harsh penalties for offenders may help a little, but only a little. The real culprits either live in Vietnam or are middle-men in Africa who make the real profits. They would never risk the actual poaching, which involves killing, hard work blood and so on.  They are the ones who need to be targeted. Of course some of them work inside the various wildlife agencies and park systems, or in the military. They will be much harder to catch, but if not caught the carnage will continue. The actual poacher on the ground may be a man who earns a few dollars a day and is trying to support a family. He may be desperate. If he has killed a few rhino (or elephants) he may have upped his social status a bit, and will therefore be even keener to be involved.

Elephant and rhino poaching update

If the reports are accurate hundreds or rhino and thousands of elephants have been poached this year, never mind the numbers from previous years. It has become difficult to keep up with the amount of traffic about rhino and elephant poaching on various social media sites and in on-line newspapers. On the one hand there are the announcements about famous people who have come out in support of anti-poaching efforts.

They include a United Nations story that China’s top film star, Li Bingbing has stepped up in support of her countryman Yao Ming. To assist in these efforts the Chinese media have been asked to back the war on poaching  Of course these two are trying to influence things that take place in the world’s major consuming country, where stunningly beautiful ivory carvings have been created for centuries and where an increasingly affluent and growing middle class can afford to make expensive purchases.

A YouTube video featuring Vietnamese singer My Linh is an attempt to raise awareness of the ‘Say NO to rhino horn” in her country.

The Secretary General of the United Nations has come out with a strongly worded statement calling poaching a “grave menace.” 

A MailOnline article about Prince Charles and Prince William has a strong personal link for me.

Most folks are aware that William proposed to his wife Katherine in Kenya. Many know that the actual words were spoken high on the eastern slopes of Mount Kenya under the shadow of a flat-topped minor peak named Rutundu at an altitude of 3311 metres (about 10,200 feet). We used to be able to see Rutundu from our living room window and I once walked up to the table lands on the shoulders of the mountain to the nearby at Lake Alice at the foot of a sister flat peak called Ithanguni.

image from

 bks.beyondkenyasafaris.com

But this was before the days when the lakes were stocked with trout by a wealthy Scadinavian who flew them in by helicopter. Nowadays the site has become an upmarket tourist destination and has rustic log cabins for guests.

Bald and one tooth missing at right. Rugby days with Mt. Kenya!

I have an even stronger link to this story as the Royal couple had been staying with a mutual friend Ian Craig at his home on Lewa Downs, which was one of my client cattle ranches for the best part of ten years. In those days Ian’s parents David and Delia ran the ranch and Ian played alongside me in pale blue strip of the Mt. Kenya rugby club as a hard-hitting open side wing forward.

Since then the ranch has become a major wildlife conservancy and is home to many rhino as well as other species, including the Grevy's zebra, which is another endagnered species.

 

Grevy's (at right) and Burchell's zebra near Lewa. Photo by Dick Neal.

Sadly the rhino there are being targeted and a recent report told of the coordinated killing of four animals on a full moon night at Lewa and three other well-known parks. 

Although these famous folk, like many of us around the world are horrified by the destruction of these iconic creatures I do wonder if the high profile and greatly increased attention is not driving the other side of the equation. If anti-poaching efforts are gaining momentum, are the bad guys grabbing what they can before the effort becomes too risky? There has been a continued increase in the rate of rhino poaching. The latest figures state that 381 have been taken in 154 days. On that trajectory the numbers for 2013 will exceed the 688 of 2012.

Two US businessmen (Vinh Chung “Jimmy” Kha and Felix Kha) were recently jailed and fined for trafficking in rhino horn.     

Of course, as I have suggested before, the poaching for a commodity (I choose the word deliberately as that is what some see it as) is not a one-sided story. A recent FB post suggests that trading in LEGAL horn derived from one of the many South African game ranches should be allowed. Johan Kurver has argued that the cost of preventing and policing poaching makes no sense when ranched rhino could provide a good income and tax base. You can follow the rhino conversation on Facebook.

Two more stories (among many) about the twin threats. The Kenya parliament has just passed an emergency bill upping the punishment for wildlife trafficking by a huge amount. Previous fines might have been as much as USD 480, a tiny proportion of the value of a single rhino horn and no sort of deterrent. Now fines may be as much as $120,000 with a 15-year jail term as well. The most striking thing about this amendment is that the vote was not unanimous. There was one quiet “nay” but nobody seems to have reported who made that call. Was that parliamentarian somehow involved in the illegal trade?

The Kenya cabinet were reacting to a country-wide upsurge in publicity that included protest marches and a well managed campaign led by people like Paula Kahumbu, who has been very active in blogs, on Facebook and Twitter on this issue.

Even a very young elephant has some ivory

On the other side it would seem that in Tanzania some thing different and ugly is taking place. Some reports claim that about 10,000 elephants a year are being poached (yes, ten thousand). Of course this form or poaching is indiscriminate. Entire families are being taken out, adults, infants and everything in between. It seems that high-placed officials and even the military are implicated. David Smith, writing on the economicsof the wildlife trade states that “More than a third of all elephant tusks seized by law enforcement last year came from Tanzania, with neighbouring Kenya a close second.” This is particularly striking in light of the interview with a senior Tanzanian minister carried out by Aidan Hartley  The minister claimed no knowledge of the problem. There can only be one of two explanations for his words, neither of them pretty. Incompetence or Collusion.

Bushmeat in Canada

-->

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

-->

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!