Summary
The majority of white and black rhinoceros are found in South Africa. This stronghold for these magnificent creatures is now being threatened by poachers killing rhino for their horns.
Rhino horn, traded illegally in parts of Asia, is thought to be a cooling agent in traditional Chinese medicine. It's recently been hailed as a cure for cancer, and is seen as a status symbol in Vietnam. Made from keratin, the same stuff as hair or fingernails rhino horn has negligible medical properties, yet people are willing to pay up to £40,000 a kilogramme for it.
International trade in rhino horn has been banned under CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) since the 1990s. Trade in horn was banned within South Africa in 2009. Since then, poaching has increased exponentially, reaching more than 1300 rhino poached in 2015.
Protecting the rhino in National and Provincial parks and privately owned reserves is a very dangerous and expensive undertaking. The government-run parks, such as Kruger National Park have about 75% of the South African rhino and are losing the most animals to poachers. The best protected rhino tend to be in the privately owned farms.
Many private rhino owners want the ban on the sale of rhino horn to be lifted.
This is because, unlike elephant ivory, pangolin scales and the bones from lions, rhinos can be dehorned without harming the animal. Many rhino owners are already removing the horns from their animals to stop them attracting poachers. So they are sitting on stockpiles of harvested horn.
With education and demand-reduction schemes not working quickly enough, rhino owners hope to satisfy the demand by legally selling their harvested horn. Some just want to trade within South Africa, while others want CITES to allow a trade agreement between South Africa and China or Vietnam. They say they would use the money earned to put back into conserving and protecting rhino.
Others worry that this would just increase demand for horn and that by making trade legal, you are encouraging people to think that it has an actual medical benefit.
It's a huge dilemma.
Producer: Fiona Roberts
Image: baby Ruby, credit Fiona Roberts
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading from the BBC. |
| 0:03.0 | The details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, |
| 0:07.0 | go to BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts. broadcasts. of the radio from one of our self-members he mentioned that he could see a rhino carcass and that there was a lot of blood from where he was standing on the road. |
| 0:30.0 | On our arrival we could see the extremely large blood trail leading to another big pool of blood. |
| 0:37.0 | In the distance when he pointed to where he could see the rhinococ |
| 0:41.0 | because I looked and I could see a great figure lying there and I proceeded |
| 0:47.2 | to walk in to secure the crime scene, trying to identify the animal that was lying there, as well as to determine what had happened |
| 0:56.4 | if, as we knew, she had been shot and poached. |
| 0:59.8 | Reserve manager Charles Theron, standing at the site of a poached rhinoceros. |
| 1:05.0 | It's a story playing out several times a day in South Africa and other countries with Rhino. |
| 1:10.0 | It's not new. Rhino horns long been valued for trophies, dagger handles and traditional medicine. |
| 1:15.2 | But in southern Africa, numbers of white and black rhino have been increasing since their historic |
| 1:19.8 | low back in the 1960s. |
| 1:21.2 | However, 7 to 8 years ago saw the start of a poaching |
| 1:25.1 | epidemic going from a handful to more than a thousand a year killed to supply an |
| 1:29.6 | illegal horn trade. In this program I'll be exploring why Rhino are under such threat and |
| 1:34.5 | considering some of the solutions being proposed including legalizing trade. |
| 1:39.4 | I'm Professor Adam Hart and in this episode of Discovery on the BBC I'm going to be exploring the horn dilemma |
| 1:45.7 | trying to find out what can be done to protect these magnificent animals. |
| 1:49.2 | As always it's going to come down to money. |
| 1:51.3 | But before I get to the often acrimonious arguments of wildlife economics, we need some facts and figures. |
| 1:56.5 | Let's start by getting a handle on the species of rhino we're talking about, from Dr Ron Orinstein. |
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