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Since this summer, news of the western black rhino's extinction has been continuously breaking on popular sites and timelines. Although the last of its kind was seen in 2001 and the species was declared extinct in 2011 — as detailed in this sharp SA piece — a realization of the loss has been lately making the rounds with renewed despair.
Meanwhile on The Colbert Report, everyone's favorite fake pundit Stephen Colbert just devoted a segment to the Dallas Safari Club (DSC) and their latest rhino initiative. Basically, the club is auctioning a black rhino hunting permit to raise funds for a black rhino conservation trust.
DSC spokesman Gayne Young has said he's "super stoked" about the opportunity, and Colbert's treatment of the plan is funny. Taking the proposal more seriously, though, I find its valorization of a dead endangered animal distasteful, notwithstanding a storied history between big game hunting and conservation (think Theodore Roosevelt or Jim Corbett). At a minimum, "[a]uctioning a rhino hunt at this time is tone deaf," as Humane Society president Wayne Pacelle has put it.1
But as out of tune as the scheme may be, it's not the only problematic option that's now being explored. With the CITES ban against the trade of rhino parts being routinely violated by poachers who receive up to $65,000 per kg of rhino horn powder,2 scholars have been thinking creatively about how to keep the world's remaining rhinos alive.
Here at Scitable, Kate Whittington has written about another controversial suggestion, this time put forth in the pages of Science3 and discussed last month as Earthwatch Institute's Big Debate of 2013. The question of the day: to save the last of the species, "Is it time to reconsider a legal global trade in tiger, elephant, and rhino products?"
Whittington attended the event, and her astute reporting covers the nuances that ensnare the issue. To summarize here, the idea involves farming rhino horn by periodically shaving off slices from living rhinos, keeping them alive while legally fulfilling a demand for rhino horn powder in countries like China and Vietnam where it is used medicinally. As poachers have demonstrated the ban to be unenforceable, perhaps a sustainable, legal trade could work?
It's a concept worth considering, if only as a hypothetical to indicate potential solutions. The alternative — make the ban enforceable — is daunting, especially if one takes into account that the CITES ban against the international trade of rhino parts went into effect in 1973, and 85% of the world's rhino population was killed between 1970 and 1987.4
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For the rest of the post, however, I'd like to take on this challenge. Perhaps idealistically, I do believe the ban could be better enforced and that rhino populations could rebound. I think this because I also believe that many conservation plans share an important pattern that may be limiting their effectiveness, and that this pattern needs assessment. Take, for example, the following initiatives to uphold the trade prohibition.
In Kenya, officials have launched an ambitious program to microchip every rhino horn in the country, enrolling more than 1,000 animals.5 With the increased surveillance, the Kenyan government and its partner on the project, the World Wildlife Fund, are aiming to keep track of the rhino population and to trace the paths of poached horns to prosecute more traffickers.
Also in South Africa are scholars working on RhODIS, or the Rhino DNA Index System. With RhODIS, the goal is to generate and retain an individual DNA profile for every rhino in the nation. If the project were completed, any rhino or rhino part from South Africa could be conclusively identified, even if it were crushed to a powder.7
What all three of these programs have in common are an intervention on the rhino body. Microchipping, dye tagging, and DNA profiling all involve invasive acts on the rhino itself. It's almost as if there's a connection between the promotional materials conservation groups use to rally support and the types of projects that are funded by those supporters. The body of the charismatic megafauna is at once the mobilizer of the cause and the target of the cause.
This critique of the charismatic megafuana conservation model seems significant, because it does not seem that increased surveillance of rhino bodies correlates with increased protection of rhino populations. In South Africa alone, at least 688 rhinos have been poached this year. 425 of that number were from Kruger National Park, which has an unmanned drone, a heat-sensing surveillance plane, and two companies of soldiers deployed in its borders.8,9
Invasive interventions on rhinos could deter poachers, but other approaches are available. Ranging in scale and difficulty of implementation, the following three ideas rather aim to protect rhinos by affecting the social and political conditions in which they reside.
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Ensure that the people living around rhino parks actually benefit from rhino preservation.
In many areas near wildlife preserves, the park itself and the local travel companies are the most powerful regional institutions, also receiving the majority of the tourism revenue. Communications between the park and the people are often limited, and the officials are frequently unelected. In these cases, with the people living around a park having little financial incentive for protecting the animals inside, at least theoretically, they may be more permissive to a black market of poaching.
One researcher, Hasani Patrick Shikolokolo, has written about this structure in Kruger National Park. He succinctly identifies that the "top-down... protectionist approaches that have traditionally characterised natural resources management regimes in the less developed countries... have had critical impacts on the food security and livelihoods of local people."10
To counter these effects, Shikolokolo recommends a number of concrete changes. When roaming wildlife kill private livestock, the park should compensate the owners for their loss. When the park makes decisions that affect the community, a forum of community members should participate. He also suggests that the park holds more skills workshops for the community, promotes small businesses and local farming, improves its communications, and fulfills commitments to funded development projects.
Personally, I think park entrants should also pay a conservation fee, of which most should be spent on scholarships and community growth. Non-consumptive benefits like these, though admittedly difficult to effect, could give local people a real stake in the health of rhino populations and potentially increase resistance to poaching operations.
Pursue the creation and support of peace parks as a way to promote human and animal populations together.
For instance, a peace park has been suggested as an exit strategy for India and Pakistan to handle ownership of Kashmir's Siachen Glacier, "the highest battleground on earth" where decades of fighting have taken around 2,000 people along with countless snow leopards and brown bears.11,12
In southern Africa, a comparable peace park named the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park is being built to join Mozambique's LimpopoNational Park and South Africa's Kruger National Park with several preserves in Zimbabwe. Relatedly, people in these nations have all fought in armed conflicts in the last half century, including the Mozambican War for Independence (1964 – 1974) and Civil War (1977 – 1992), the Zimbabwean War of Liberation (1964 –1979), the South African Border War (1966 – 1990), and violence during the negotiations to end Apartheid (1990 – 1993).
This park could be an opportunity for reconciliation and diplomacy on many levels, with government officials working together toward a shared, positive goal. Moreover, as most of the poachers killing rhinos in South Africa are entering from Mozambique, maybe the communal responsibility will bring political pressure to the situation so that all nations involved employ comparable legal regulations for the environment.
People living around the park in all three countries could meet annually to discuss the impact of rhino tourism and what they will request from the park in the upcoming year. With their combined resources, a robust wildlife detection dog program could be installed at all airports in the area, helping to prevent rhino parts from leaving the region and entering buyer countries. Perhaps the extensive training for this detection dog program could bring young people together from all three nations, advancing relationships and careers.
This version may be naive and romantic, and the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park is off to a rocky start, but I think more can be done to fulfill the promise the term "peace park" makes. If the countries involved can actually develop it as a site of peace and really work to achieve social justice and opportunities to thrive there, this commitment to people could form the basis for a secure foundation for rhino recovery.
Approach the use of rhino horn in Traditional Chinese Medicine from a different angle.
In this vein of understanding, I'd like to close with one last suggestion, one that deals more directly with the link between rhino deaths and human health.
Specifically, rhino horn powder has been used by practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) for centuries to treat a range of complaints. In contrast, doctors and scholars from western medicine have examined the health benefits of rhino horn and have found none, as it is made of the same substance in one's own nails, keratin.
Organizations like TRAFFIC have tried to inform consumers in Vietnam and other buyer countries of this fact. Nevertheless, despite the best of intentions, this logic of discrediting a TCM practice with western medicine's ‘superior science' is, for many, culturally imperialistic. Even in terms of negotiating and achieving reforms, approaching potential partners by insulting years of their beliefs seems a challenging way to begin.
For either practitioners find a rhino horn replacement and the species is protected by a diminished parts market, or practitioners will need to find a rhino horn replacement because the species has been hunted to extinction.
This type of thinking may seem far out of the box, but the status quo is failing fast. No one solution will staunch the rhino losses, but if the trade ban is to be more than a band-aid, additional points of injury may need to be addressed.
Image credits: This image of a white rhino in Namibia's Waterberg National Park is from Wikipedia commons. The last three were modified in Photoshop.
1. Marshall, L. "Record 618 South African Rhinos Poached for Horns in 2012, So Far." National Geographic. December 11, 2012.
2. Swartsell, N. "Texas Emerging as Center for Illegal Trade of Black Rhino Horns." Dallas Morning News. November 10, 2013.
3. Biggs, D., Courchamp F., Martin R. & Possingham, H.P. (2013). Conservation: Legal trade of Africa's rhino horns. Science, 339, 1038-1039 PMID: 23449582
4. Sheeline, L. (1987). Is There a Future in the Wild for Rhinos. Traffic USA, 7, 1-7.
5. BBC. "Kenya to Microchip Every Rhino in Anti-Poaching Drive." BBC News. October 16, 2013.
6. Angler, M. "Dye and Poison Stop Rhino Poachers." Scientific American. May 9, 2013.
7. Steyn, A., and M. Stalmans. "Use Of Dna Technology In White Rhino (Cerathotherium Simum) Identification And Its Applications In Conservation." Game and Wildlife Science 21, no. 4 (2004): 787-795.
8. Conway-Smith, E. "South Africa Sics Drones on Rhino Poachers." Salon. January 11, 2013.
9. Welz, A. "The War on African Poachng: Is Militarization Fated to Fail?" Yale Environment 360. August 12, 2013.
10. Shikolokolo, H P. "An evaluation of the impact of Kruger National Park's development programme on the Hlanganani community in Limpopo." PhD diss., 2010.
11. Dutta, S. "Out of the Box Ideas for Glacier — Siachen Could Become Bio Reserve or Peace Park." The Telegraph. June 14, 2005.
12. Kemkar, N. A. (2006). Environmental peacemaking: Ending conflict between India and Pakistan on the Siachen Glacier through the creation of a transboundary peace park. Stan. Envtl. LJ , 25 DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.748145
