The rhino is certainly one of the most endangered large mammals in Southern Africa and it is definitely threatened with extinction and yet the very people who should be saving it i.e. CITES and our nature conservation authorities are helping instead to push it to extinction.

The Rhino (uniquely amongst our large animals) grows its horn again if it is cut off, in other words you can cut it off with no ill effects to the Rhino and in two or three years time you can cut it off again. The Rhino lives for up to 40 years so why would you want to kill it at any stage during that 40 years but most Rhino in this country are killed long before they even reach the half way mark.

It is a fact that anyone who wants a permit to take a Rhino horn out of this country must kill the Rhino first. The only exception is if you export the live rhino with its horn intact. Either way this country loses a rhino which we can simply not afford as it is one of our most valuable natural resources. It has now been proven that when nature conservation stopped issuing permits to Vietnamese, poaching rocketed. Yet we have so much horn in state coffers and being carried on live rhinos in the private sector all of which could be used to reduce poaching without harm to the rhino!

It is a fact that the majority of rhino hunters in this country are pseudo hunters and they do not want to kill the animal, they only want the horn. But our regulations (national and international) force them to kill the animal to get a permit to export the horn.

The government and CITES could dramatically immediately reduce the poaching by legalizing the trade in the Rhino horn.

It is time we did something to stop this atrocious slaughter…we need your voice!

Monday, March 21, 2011

We need our rhino livestock to stay in Southern Africa!

In our last Blog entry we voiced our concern about the government revoking export permits for live rhino – mentioning that this was the last incentive for our private rhino farmers to stay in business.

The reaction to this was “Why would we even consider exporting our precious rhino to foreign countries?”

We could not agree more: We need our rhino livestock to stay in Southern Africa and increase breeding numbers, therefore exporting is by far not the ideal choice.


But if it was possible for a free market situation where the private rhino farmers in Southern Africa were receiving the same amount of money for their horn production as their counter parts in China or if the rhino farming sector was a healthy industry with options to sell progeny to other Southern African farmers, no farmer in SA would want to export his rhino.

This is unfortunately not the case and in the meantime the private rhino farmer in Southern Africa has virtually no other legal income from his rhino production, other than hunting and killing the rhino. Exporting was the only option to create a legal income for the private rhino farmer.

Knowing that the rhino will not be poached in China when exported, and that the horn produced by them will go into the market and possibly save some rhino lives in Africa, exporting the live rhino seems like the better option currently. Hopefully the person buying the horn produced in China will buy less from iligal poachers.

But again, we would like to state that the ideal situation would be for us to keep our live rhino and their progeny in Southern Africa. Let’s supply the market ourselves and be sustainable rhino breeding farmers, having our rhino’s best interest at heart!
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“Did you know these rhino facts?”

  • • Rhino are endangered and nearing extinction due to relentless hunting and poaching
  • • Rhino populations have declined by 90 percent since 1970
  • • Rhino are classified in 5 species all of which are endangered. We have two species in Africa – the Black rhino and White rhino
  • • Rhino horn is not a true horn and is made of thickly matted hair
  • • Rhino horn can be removed from the rhino with no ill effect to the animal if done professionally
  • • Rhino horn regrows to a substantial length with in four years
  • • Rhino horn can only be exported as a hunting (killed rhino) trophy
  • • Rhino horn stock piles exist that could be sold to support conservation