Eddie Koch
SAKKIE VAN NIEKERK had just spotted Willie, who had caused a bit of bother by hiding in a thick copse of trees on the farm near Pretoria, and was getting ready to fire a dart packed with powerful sedatives into his backside.
“Well, wouldn’t you also hide away if you were going to have your horn cut off in public?” asked Van Niekerk as he drank a cup of coffee with a group of journalists who had come to watch the early morning operation.
The vet got into a chopper with his dart gun and a few minutes later Willie, a rogue white rhino bull who has taken to killing his own male offspring on the farm, was staggering through the bush with a train of scientists, photographers, conservationists and curious onlookers running behind him.
Willie dropped haplessly on to his side, the vet used a large white bandage to blindfold him, the conservationists pushed the beast on to its knees so that his rib cage would not be crushed by the sheer weight of his torso and Van Niekerk took out his chainsaw. Five minutes later, with shavings of the dense keratin that rhino horn is made of lying around his massive face , Willie was without his horn and Sakkie’s colleagues were cracking jokes about how sexy he was going to be in bed that night after inhaling all that aphrodisiac dust.
An antidote was administered to Willie’s ear and within minutes the animal rose to his feet and trotted off to the copse of bushes. “I could probably get $30 000 for this horn in the Far East. That’s more than R130 000 and it will grow back in two years when I can cut it again,” said Van Niekerk.
“We believe that the best way to conserve rhino is for the ban on trading in horn to be lifted so that we can farm with these animals just like any other form of livestock. Then there’s big money to be made out of rhinos and farmers will increase the amount of land that they set aside for rhino. That’s the best way to save them.
“I’m going to put this horn in a bank and we members of the African Rhino Owners Association (AROA) are going to push for the trade in horn to be legalised. You know if you ban something you push it underground. If you legalise it you can control it.”
The dehorning of Willie was, therefore, for two reasons: to prevent the rhino bull from goring young rivals to death and to demonstrate in public that it was possible to conserve rhinos by allowing farmers like Van Niekerk to treat them in much the same way as cattle or horses.
The idea of farming with rhinos in this way is fast gaining ground among conservationists and private owners of these animals and, a few hours after the chainsaw operation on Willie, delegates to AROA formally decided to push for an end to the ban imposed by the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) on international sales of rhino horn.
“The two major causes for the decline in rhino numbers worldwide are the loss of habitat and direct human exploitation. There are documented uses for a whole range of rhino body parts including the skin, bones, fat, blood, heart, stomach, penis, horns, hooves, teeth, eyes, tail hairs and even dung and urine. The two main uses for the horn are medicinal and ornamental – and not for aphrodisiacs as is popularly believed,” says Barry James, a conservation expert at the University of Natal.
The horn is ground into a powder for the treatment of fever in the Far East and in the Middle East its major use is ornamental. Yemeni men wear traditional daggers called janbiyyas which have ornate handles carved from a variety of substances. The most sought after are those made from rhino horn.
“There is such a fervent belief in the power of rhino horn in medicine and janbiyyas are so much part of Yemeni culture, that in spite of trade being illegal, it will always take place, no matter what the risks. The price will simply escalate,” says James.
“People often compare the trade in rhino horn to that in ivory. But the comparison is invalid. The consumption of ivory in Western countries virtually ceased because of a well-orchestrated media campaign against it and because ivory is viewed in those countries as a luxury. The use of rhino in Eastern countries is a firmly established cultural `necessity’ and will entail a complete change in culture. This is highly unlikely, either in the immediate or distant future … So why not farm them for their horns?”
* Support for the lifting of Cites bans on trade in the products of elephants and rhino came from another source this week. About 100 delegates from villages along the western border of the Kruger National Park backed plans by Botswana, Namibia and Zimbabwe to lobby for elephants to be removed from the Cites trade ban.
The villagers proposed that they be allowed to stage controlled safaris for trophy hunters inside the park in order to generate revenues for their communities.