“The private sector is responsible for rhino numbers in South Africa,” said Pelham Jones, chairperson of the Rhino Owners Association. “In pure agricultural terms, SANParks are the producers. They sell off excess stock to farm owners, who make their money from tourism or from hunting, or from selling to hunters, who are major off-takers of excess bulls and ageing animals.”
“By selling an ageing cow to a hunter, a farmer gets money to buy two calves. Hunting pays for conservation, but like any market, supply and demand dictate price, and price dictates investor interest. Right now fear of rhino ownership is so great buying is on hold, and smaller farmers are putting their animals on the market.”
Many conservationists agree legal hunting is crucial to the sustainability of rhino numbers, but new laws have let horn traders infiltrate traditional hunting markets. “In 2005 Vietnamese men began arriving in South Africa to hunt rhino and legally acquire the horns,” said Faan Coetzee, head of the Endangered Wildlife Trust’s rhino security project. “The fact that ranchers were turning such a profit on the horns pushed up the price of legal hunts.“In 2006, rhino were valued at R5 500/inch of horn. By the end of 2008 the price had risen as high as R28 000 per inch of horn, and the American hunters that had constituted the traditional market had been priced out.
Thanks to their greed, rhino owners were left only with the Vietnamese market, which attracted critical attention to the business.” In August 2008, the government imposed a moratorium on the sale of trophy horns and stipulated that a hunter could only hunt one rhino a year. This had devastating implications for the rhino population as poaching increased. In 2008, before the moratorium was put in place, 83 rhino were poached. In 2009 this had risen to 122 and by 28 September 2010 it stood at 204.
“There’s no two ways about it, the one hunter/one rhino stipulation has contributed to poaching figures in a big way,” said Rusty Huster, head of security for South Africa’s North West Parks and Tourism Board. Coetzee added, “The most effective solution to the poaching problem at the moment would be to liberalise legal hunting, while putting in place long-term measures such as horn farming and selling off the national stockpile of rhino horn.”
With the traditional hunting market still depressed by the high price of hunts, unscrupulous ranchers are buying large numbers of rhino to sell the horns to dubious hunters, or directly to traders. Dawie Groenewald, one of the 11 Musina-based individuals arrested in September on suspicion of rhino poaching-related activities, owns the hunting ranch Prachtig, on which there are currently 32 rhino and which, according to reports, is referred to by locals as “the slaughterhouse”.
Investigators are currently searching for rhino carcasses believed to be buried on Prachtig, while many of the live rhino on the farm were allegedly found without their horns. “Unfortunately, a few of our number have brought this national embarrassment down on the rest of us,” said Jones. “They’ve tarnished the reputation of the sector and it’s now critical that we re-establish the credibility of rhino as an investment. If we don’t, the fragile economic balance which sustains rhino numbers will remain skewed and their numbers will continue to fall.”
