Thaba Manzi Wildlife Services vet Dr Jana Pretorius, and wildlife capture expert Hans Kooy, were watching TV when armed men broke into the house and demanded access to the horns stored on the property. According to media reports, Thaba Manzi marketing manager Johan Pretorius said, apart from Pretorius and Kooy, only the provincial environmental affairs department could’ve known where the rhino horns were.
The statement angered many conservation specialists. “It’s very irresponsible,” said Faan Coetzee, who heads the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s Law and Policy Programme. “Landowners are a difficult crowd, and this implicit accusation, based on no evidence at all, could potentially cause them to say, ‘OK, we’ll never apply for a permit again’.”
There were several people involved in capturing the rhino and removing the horns, and the information could’ve come from any of them, he added. Coetzee said rhino horns were a “dead asset”, and a liability to whoever stored them. “I always say, if you want to be safe, burn the bloody things.
You need a permit to do this, and for obvious reasons you need to have witnesses present to verify that you’ve destroyed the horns, but after that the liability is gone. The horn is worth zilch because you can’t trade it,” he said. According to Wildlife Ranching South Africa chairperson Pelham Jones, rhino owners are holding onto horns in the hope that the commercial ban on trading rhino horn will be lifted.
“We brought this issue up at the recent ministerial summit on rhino poaching, with a request for an urgent study to be done on the possibility of lifting the ban. It was also debated by the Rhino Management Group, where we agreed to put a motivation forward to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in regard to lifting the ban,” Jones said.
Threatened or Protected Species (TOPS) legislation ”is so restrictive it’s turning ordinary people into criminals, simply because they don’t understand what’s required of them”, he added.
“Firstly, you need a permit before you remove a horn. Secondly, there’s a clear protocol that requires you to register the physical features of the horn. Thirdly, you have two choices in regard to storage – you can either keep the horn on your own property, or stow it at the bank, but the banks are kicking back against this because they have to have a TOPS permit to hold that horn,” said Jones. “As a result, the landowner is now faced with huge risks. That’s why there’s this push for lifting the ban. We want rhino owners to be able to get rid of this liability.”
