As a small and self funded team we have come to the 58th general Assembly of the International Council for Game and Wildlife Conservation (C.I.C) St. Petersburg, Russia as a desperate measure to try and meet the right influential people and follow protocol as everybody suggested we do -
JOHN HUME – Presentation to C.I.C General Assembly, St. Petersburg, RUSSIA (May 2011)
Thank you Mr. Chairman and the other people that made it possible for me to make this short appeal on behalf of our rhino which are in a terrible crisis.
We have to find a way to protect rhino or they will go extinct very shortly rhino are vulnerable and totally dependant on wise men for their survival.
It is estimated that 50 years ago there were a 100,000 rhino in Africa with probably 2 – 3,000 in South Africa and 97 or 98,000 in the rest of Africa. This figure has now inverted with a total of about 26,000 rhino of which approximately 22,000 are in South Africa and 4,000 in the rest of Africa. So 98,000 in the rest of Africa have become 4,000 while 2,000 in South Africa have become 22,000. South Africa kept the poachers at bay while rhino were wiped out in most of Africa.
Now in South Africa we are facing the scourge and we are having one rhino poached everyday. Clearly we have done too little to help the rhino or rather what we have done has been the wrong thing. To make things worse the consumers or Pseudo hunters, as I call them, are demanding probably 98% of the legally hunted rhino and killing them in such a way as to blacken the reputation of genuine trophy hunters.
In order to sustainably produce rhino in my opinion we have to encourage private owners to breed them as they are simply better at protecting their rhino than the Governments of Africa have been. Unfortunately the opposite has occurred in the last 10 years where the private owners in South Africa have been dramatically discouraged from breeding rhino by onerous and punitive legislation.
The rhino horn re-grows so if it could be farmed sustainably and the farmers were allowed to make a profit from horn production they would never need to sell an animal to be killed by a horn consumer and that ladies and gentleman is also happening everyday in South Africa.
The one thing that we should be doing for our rhino is breeding as many as possible and killing as few as possible but everything that we are doing is aiming at the opposite. Why can’t we wake up and realize that the rhino could produce an income for communities, emergent black farmers and commercial farmers and that the owners of rhino would never want to kill them if they were making a sustainable income from them. In other words they would not kill the goose that was laying golden eggs.
When the poachable rhino in the rest of Africa had diminished dramatically the Eastern demand found that they could legally pseudo sport hunt rhino in South Africa. Then about 3 years ago when the South African government became aware of this they drastically reduced the permits and visas issued to Eastern hunters and poaching dramatically escalated.
I think the government and the conservationist in South Africa towards the end of last year considered that the better of the two evils would be to issue more permits for hunting in an attempt to stop the poaching because at least the hunting permits would be utilized predominantly for male rhino whereas poaching is indiscriminate often targeting pregnant cows as well as cows with small calves.
Now I have become aware of the most bizarre and terrible situation involving the rhino. It turns out that it has become more attractive to a Pseudo hunter to kill a young six or eight year old bull with a horn of 16 – 20 inches rather than a trophy bull of 28 – 30 inches. This is because the hunter pays by the kilo of horn on the dead rhino and the horn of a young animal apparently is cheaper by the kilo.
Thus we are killing the very rhino which are capable of saving their species from extinction as they can produce one kilo of rhino horn per year for the next 30 – 35 years if it was harvested regularly from the live rhino. It has been proven that it is possible to safely and painlessly dehorn rhino without much stress.
We could thus face the situation where we had the capability of sustainably producing enough horn to keep the poachers at bay and increase the numbers of our rhino population, but where we allowed this to slip through our fingers by killing the very animals that could sustainably produce the horn that could save our rhino from extinction.
When the white rhino was taken off CITES Appendix 1 South Africa was allowed to trophy hunt white rhino and get a CITES permit to export the trophy and it was this that gave the Eastern pseudo hunter the gap to kill rhino and export the trophy. If we put white rhino back to Appendix 1 it would also be the death knell for our rhino population because our poaching would merely escalate to higher levels as no rhino horn could be legally acquired.
There is only one hope for the rhino in Africa and that is to continue our efforts to increase our anti poaching coupled with the legalizing of the trade in rhino horn. This would enable farmers to sustainably produce and harvest rhino horn without killing the rhino when it is destined for consumer use rather than trophies.
When a genuine trophy hunter requires a trophy it will not impact on the production of horn because the large trophy animals are all near the end of their productive life. Unlike the young animals that are currently being slaughtered for the consumer trade rather than for the trophy hunter.
I feel incredibly helpless in the face of what I consider is the impending extinction of the rhino in Africa and I feel that the people who could do something about it are either standing by with folded arms or are completely unaware or uncaring that the rhino will go extinct.
Please consider the following: - The existing wildlife conservation agencies have failed, failed spectacularly, to conserve rhino over the past 50 years, and they show no signs of changing the strategy. To continue with the same failed strategy and hope for different results is insanity. A regulated trade in horn has the best chance of solving the problem and a few good brains that understand how markets work could produce a much better strategy.
I repeat rhino are vulnerable and totally dependant on wise men for their survival. I plead with you to go back to your home country and persuade your delegate to CITES not to rely on the continuation of the trade ban, as being the solution. Southern Africa has the capacity to supply, on a sustainable basis, all the horn the medicine market demands, horn sourced from natural death, existing legal stock piles, and sustainable, legal farmed horn.
There is no need to kill one animal for the consumers of horn as they do not need a trophy. It is an absurd situation! We could without poaching have 50 000 rhino in 12 years. That should be our target and our measurable bottom line.
We need your individual support in this plea – please voice your opinion on our Blog where you can also view a small video clip on the dehorning of a rhino, showing the little impact this procedure has on the animal for he is feeding with-in 18 minutes from being darted, and 5 min from waking-up.
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