Posted on 13 January
2011
Killings continue unabated in first days
of 2011
A total of 333 rhinos were illegally killed
in South Africa in 2010, including ten critically
endangered black rhinos, according to national
park officials. The yearly total is the
highest ever experienced in South Africa
and nearly triple 2009 when 122 rhinos were
killed in the country. An additional five
rhinos have been lost to poaching since
the new year.
Kruger National Park,
the world famous safari destination, was
hardest hit losing 146 rhinos to poaching
in 2010, authorities said. The park is home
to the largest populations of both white
and black rhinos in the country. Rhinos
constitute one of the much-revered “Big
5” of African wildlife tourism, including
elephants, lions, leopards and Cape buffalo.
Rhino poaching across
Africa has risen sharply in the past few
years, threatening to reverse hard-won population
increases achieved by conservation authorities
during the 20th century. The first alarming
yearly spike occurred in 2008 when 83 rhinos
were lost. South Africa has responded by
intensifying its law enforcement efforts,
and made approximately 162 poaching arrests
last year.
“Many more successful
convictions, backed up by appropriately
daunting penalties will significantly demonstrate
the South African government’s commitment
to preventing the clouding of the country’s
excellent rhino conservation track record
that it has built up over the past several
decades,” said Dr. Morné du Plessis,
CEO of WWF South Africa.
The current wave of
poaching is being committed by sophisticated
criminal networks using helicopters, night-vision
equipment, veterinary tranquilisers and
silencers to kill rhinos at night while
attempting to avoid law enforcement patrols.
“The criminal syndicates
operating in South Africa are highly organised
and use advanced technologies. They are
very well coordinated,” said Dr. Joseph
Okori, WWF African Rhino Programme Manager.
“This is not typical poaching.”
The recent killing increase
is largely due to heightened demand for
rhino horn, which has long been prized as
an ingredient in traditional Asian medicine.
It has been claimed recently that rhino
horn possesses cancer-curing properties,
despite there being no medical evidence
to support the assertion.
“Only a concerted international
enforcement pincer movement, at both ends
of the supply and demand chain, can hope
to nip this rhino poaching crisis in the
bud,” said Tom Milliken, Director of TRAFFIC’s
East and Southern Africa programme. Milliken
pointed to recently established coordination
links between officials in South Africa
and Vietnam, the country heavily implicated
in the recent poaching surge.
South Africa is home
to approximately 21,000 rhinos, more than
any other country in the world. Black rhinos
are listed as critically endangered with
only about 4,200 remaining in existence,
according to the International Union for
Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Approximately
1,670 black rhinos were believed to be living
in South Africa in 2009. The country's other
resident species, white rhinos, are classified
as near threatened on IUCN’s Red List of
threatened species.
“The recovery of African
white rhinos from less than 100 in the late
19th century to more than 20,000 today is
a phenomenal conservation success story
that can largely be attributed to the combined
efforts of South Africa’s state and private
conservation authorities. Consumers of rhino
horn across Asia, and in Vietnam in particular,
are now seriously compromising this achievement
by motivating criminal groups to kill rhinos.
In order to halt this massacre, substantial
resources need to go into law enforcement,
both in Africa and in Asian consumer countries
where all trade in rhino horn is illegal,"
said Dr. du Plessis.
In South Africa, WWF’s
Black Rhino Range Expansion Project aims
to increase the overall numbers of black
rhino by making available additional breeding
lands. This is done by forming partnerships
with owners of large areas of natural black
rhino habitat. So far, 98 black rhino have
been translocated to new range lands and
at least 26 calves have been born on project
sites. In December 2010, South Africa’s
Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Authority
committed to donating 20 black rhino to
the project in an effort to aid South Africa
in reaching its national target of 5,000
black rhinos.
In
October 2010, TRAFFIC facilitated a visit
of five South African officials to Vietnam
to discuss strategies for combating the
illegal rhino horn trade. TRAFFIC, the wildlife
trade monitoring network, is a joint programme
of WWF and IUCN.
