A friend forwarded me a list of articles on the hunting of endangered rhinos to fuel conservation funding. Within all fields of conservation - including marine - managers are looking to economic arguments to save nature. It seems an unfortunate truth that very few governments even think of conseving nature for nature's sake without human consideration.
When I was in Brazil I wrote about local perception there that "the world" believed the Amazon Rainforest should be preserves for all of humanity whereas Brazilians resented others trying to mettle in their affairs and their sovereign lands.
I've heard the "hunting of endangered species for profit" argument before with rhinos and elephants. I think it's unfortunate but most of those governments with the animals don't have the money for enforcement and they usually target really old females or sick individuals and don't allow suffering so I think if done properly it is a valid method of culling a population and providing funds for enforcement and protection.
The articles give a number of examples for several African countries, both for private game reserves and for government national parks.
The articles also describe the illegal trade in rhino horn by Vietnamese to Chinese and other Asians for use in "medicines." it is one thing to argue with someone on the emotional merits of displaying the dead severed head of an endangered animal on their wall or to make stools out of their feet but I think it's unfortunate that rhino horn (keratin just like our fingernails chemically) is being sought for medicinal purposes when their is no scientific value. But people don't act logically.
In the US many have argued that hunters help protect species because targetted species need a healthy environment to survive and that through such protective actions a host of other species in the same ecosystem benefit.
Thanks to my friend for the forward and I hope everyone enjoys reading the very interesting articles below that aim to give a first-person perspective of such hunts.
Robert
P.S. Sorry for the multicolored fonts but I composed this article on my iPod while in a hostel lobby.
Sent from my iPod
Hunters Paying $150,000 to Kill Black Rhinos May Save Species
2010-12-09 22:05:30.79 GMT
2010-12-09 22:05:30.79 GMT
By Brendan Borrell
Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- In June 1996 a game rancher named John Hume paid about $200,000 for three pairs of endangered black rhinos from the wildlife department of the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. Among them was a male who would come to be called "Number 65," and whose death would play a central role in the debate about conservation.
South Africa did not start the auctions because it had a surplus of the animals. Quite the opposite. Although the black rhinos had been reproducing, they were still critically endangered. Only about 1,200 remained within the country's borders, Bloomberg Businessweek reports in its Dec. 13 issue.
But black rhinos are massive animals, and with just under 7 percent of the country set aside in protected areas, conservationists and wildlife departments had run out of room to accommodate them.
Hume's 6,500-hectare ranch, Mauricedale, lies in the hot, scrubby veldt in northeastern South Africa. Hume, 68, made his fortune in taxis, hotels, and time-shares, and Mauricedale was his Xanadu, a retirement project of immense proportions. In the late 1990s he began buying up many of the neighboring farms and ranches, and his triangular estate would soon be boxed in on all sides by roads and sugar cane plantations.
Hume also was rapidly becoming the largest private owner of white rhinos; there are currently 250 split between Mauricedale and another similar property. He also raises cape buffalo, roan and sable antelopes, hippos, giraffes, zebras, and ostriches.
Rhino Number 65
When the black rhino bull arrived, Hume's farm manager -- a burly Zimbabwean named Geoff York whose typical mode of dress is army boots and a pair of purple shorts -- tranquilized him, clipped two notches in his left ear and two in the right, and gave him a number: 65.
With a horn worn down to 20 inches from rubbing it against rocks, Number 65 was not a beautiful bull. It wouldn't take long for him to cause trouble at Mauricedale. Very soon, Number 65 started fights with a young male, who died in November 2000 following a particularly nasty run-in. He chased the other bulls off to an area of the farm called Thanda Nani so he could have the females all to himself. For two years he mingled exclusively with Hume's cows, yet they never bore him a calf. He was no longer able to breed.
"He dominated the farm," says York. "We knew he was a problem."
"Surplus Male Problem"
Hume was not the only one struggling with his black rhino bulls. As far back as 1992, the African Rhino Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature had discussed the "surplus male problem," says the group's longtime scientific officer, Richard Emslie. Females can raise only a single offspring every two to three years, but males can sire many. As in cattle ranching, population growth rates are highest when the number of bulls in a herd is limited.
It was beginning to look as if, for the first time since they were added to Appendix I -- the highest level of protection under the 1977 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, known as CITES -- a black rhino should be legally hunted and killed.
More conservationists, such as the World Wildlife Fund, are embracing the notion that legalized hunting -- and the creation of a market for the right to shoot and harvest an animal -- may help endangered species.
The black rhino is a trophy for many hunters, who are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot them. Such men travel to Africa from Russia, Japan, Spain, and Eastern Europe, but Americans dominate the market.
Hunting Client
Fred Leonard, who once had a Michigan business designing plastic parts for the auto industry, is a typical client. Despite two open-heart surgeries, Leonard has made 13 trips to the continent to bag leopard, lion, elephant, buffalo, and various antelope. He's got more than 75 dead animals -- all of them legal -- displayed in a special room in his house outside of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Leonard bemoans the common confusion of hunters with poachers. The difference, he says, is that hunters care about the environment -- and the law.
"Most hunters are decent people," he says.
Hunting and trade of an internationally endangered species such as the black rhino is governed through CITES. From 1970 to 1992, Africa's black rhino population plummeted from 65,000 to fewer than 2,500 as professional poaching gangs sought the horns, used as decorative dagger handles in the Middle East and ground down and ingested as a supposed aphrodisiac and stomach aid in Asia. The species, under a general hunting ban, had rebounded since, to about 3,610 by December 2003.
Endangered Species Rules
Even if South Africa had a lot of, and maybe too many, black rhinos in some areas, the country could not act alone. South Africa's deputy director of biodiversity compliance at the Environmental Affairs and Tourism Dept., Sonja Meintjes, would have to persuade two-thirds of the parties of CITES to vote to allow a hunt at the next meeting in Bangkok the following year.
Meintjes' general argument runs counter to everything conservationists have taught the world about endangered species, but she and many others believed hunting could reward both wildlife and investors such as Hume, who were setting aside huge parcels of land for the animals. Proof that hunting works can be seen in the success of South Africa's white rhino populations, says Emslie.
"They started hunting in 1968 when there were 1,800 in the country. Now we are looking at 19,400."
Animal Rights
Still, black rhino hunting is hotly debated. Animal rights groups, such as the International Fund for Animal Welfare, have long opposed killing wildlife for any reason. The Endangered Wildlife Trust, a South African conservation organization, has also come out against the hunts, although it supports trophy hunting of more common species, such as leopard.
"Our attitude with the rhino has been to err on the side of caution until we are sure of the stability of the population across Africa," says Tim Snow, manager of the Trust's wildlife conflict mitigation program.
As the political and scientific debate developed in the lead-up to the 2004 CITES meeting, professional hunters began jockeying for the right to guide the first legal black rhino hunt in decades. The black rhino's secretive habits and aggressive nature make it one of the most dangerous and difficult big-game animals to kill, and it has long been one of the "big five" trophy game animals, along with the elephant, lion, buffalo, and leopard.
Professional Hunter
Among the contestants was Peter Thormahlen, a South African of German descent, who earned an MBA and a degree in organic chemistry in the 1990s at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein and then abandoned a future in fertilizers for a life in the bush.
Hume had worked with Thormahlen and picked him to run the hunt.
"Professional hunters are not the most honest guys in the world," Hume says. "Peter has been by far the best we've dealt with."
In October 2004, when word came back from Thailand that Meintjes had obtained five tags for older males in South Africa, Thormahlen went to the U.S., where the hunters and the money are, to find a client. He soon connected with an American hunter in the financial services business, who within days wired a $25,000 deposit on a $150,000 fee for a seven-day hunt. Most of that would go to Hume.
Following Footprints
On July 21, 2005, the hunter, whom Thormahlen declines to name, arrived in South Africa with his double-barreled shotgun in his luggage. Thormahlen's game scouts and Hume's trackers had already been following Number 65's footprints and scratch marks for several days. Occasionally they might glimpse his hind end in the shadows or hear him rustling through the thorn bushes.
At dawn on July 23, Thormahlen was rumbling along in a beige Land Cruiser with the client in the passenger seat and a couple of scouts on the roof seats. Just after 11 a.m. they spotted Number 65 taking a dust bath in a shallow ravine. The bull had not yet noticed the hunters, which would have either sent him running or, more likely, charging.
As the rest of the team stayed by the vehicle, Thormahlen and his client proceeded on foot. Suddenly the rhino noticed them and rose from the dirt. The client pulled the trigger, and the first bullet pierced Number 65's skull. The rhino, still standing, turned. A second bullet hit, and the rhino dropped dead.
"No Joy"
Thormahlen, the client, and a government observer walked over to the rhino that had caused so much mischief on Mauricedale. "It was unbelievable," Thormahlen says. "There was no joy or stupidity. We stood there and we were overwhelmed by what we had accomplished."
That first hunter has gone to great lengths to protect his privacy: He took no photos of himself with the rhino and according to Thormahlen had at least the horn, and likely the head, exported to a second home outside the U.S. under a permit with a friend's name on it.
Because the black rhino is also listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service would have had to issue an exception for the import of black rhino body parts, which it has never done.
Louisiana lawyer John Jackson, through his organization Conservation Force, has been pressing the agency to develop a trophy-hunting policy compatible with CITES. In November 2009 he submitted a permit application for another Thormahlen client, Colorado-based David K. Reinke, who paid $215,000 for his successful hunt that year, according to the application. The agency has not responded to the application and declined requests for comment.
Russian Clients
Since then, Thormahlen has led hunts for one or two black rhinos each year at Mauricedale and government game reserves in KwaZulu-Natal. He says one of his clients, Russian petroleum billionaire Rashid Sardarov, had a gun worth 450,000 euros. Shooting one black rhino was not enough for him, and he has since shot two others.
Georgi Brilling, a Russian businessman, was one of Thormahlen's most reverent clients. When he shot his black rhino in 2007, he leaned over it and touched it around the eyes in awe. Thormahlen tried to take photos of him with his prize, but Brilling stopped him. A snapshot of the hunter and the hunted -- a fixture on the walls of most outdoorsmen -- suddenly seemed cheap in the presence of one of the most extraordinary and endangered of animals.
"I didn't shoot it for photos," Brilling said. "I shot it because it was one of the biggest compliments I could give to the black rhino."
Feeding the Klipspringer
Late one May afternoon at his Mauricedale office, Hume stands in khaki shorts, scooping handfuls of live mealworms and tossing them to his bird, Princess, a purple-crested lourie. A tiny klipspringer antelope teeters on hooves atop a polished wooden boardroom table.
"Hello my baby, hello my baby," Hume says sweetly as he tempts the antelope with a wriggler.
Hume grew up fishing and hunting on his parent's cattle farm in southeastern Zimbabwe. He left school at 14 and soon had three farms of his own.
Although he loved farming, at 25 he woke up and said to himself, "Farming is a mug's game: Just about every business you can think of is better at making money." So he started buying hotels, then a few taxi companies in the capital of Salisbury, now Harare. Eventually his 250 cabs were aiming for "a million kilometers a month." Hume pursued other businesses in South Africa and the U.S., all the while dreaming of returning to the veldt.
Breeding Rare Species
"The idea was just to hang out and go game driving," he says. "I don't even hunt anymore, although I will shoot something if it's wounded."
In 1992 he purchased the first chunk of Mauricedale, and within a year or two he realized he could make money by breeding rare species. He began expanding the ranch, restoring land once cleared for agriculture and stocking it with antelope, Cape buffalo, and eventually white and black rhino.
Today he says the farm is slightly profitable and certainly more valuable than when he bought it. It has revenue of 25 million rand ($2.5 million): About 80 percent comes from selling live animals to fellow farmers and exporters and 20 percent from hunting.
Mauricedale is more than a source of income. It's become Hume's proof of concept that the free market is the best way to conserve wildlife. Just as he was a force behind legalizing black rhino hunts, he has now hired a full-time lawyer who works to legalize international trade in white rhino horn obtained by tranquilizing the animal.
White Rhino Recovery
Once as endangered as the black rhino, the South African white rhino was downlisted by CITES to Appendix II in 1994, meaning it is no longer endangered although it is still under threat from poaching.
"White rhinos are the most incredible animals on earth," Hume says. "I'm desperately sorry for them because they need our help."
Since 2002, Hume has been cutting his white rhinos' horns every two years like a farmer shearing his sheep. They grow back. He believes this protects the rhinos from poachers and eventually will make raising them on private property economically viable. Indeed, he doesn't allow hunting of his white rhinos anymore: They're too valuable for their horns.
Cobus Raath, a former veterinarian from Kruger National Park, sometimes helps him tranquilize members of the herd to cut off their horns with a chain saw. It sounds cruel, but Raath says it's just like clipping very large nails.
Horns in Storage
Today, Hume has over 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds) of white rhino horn individually measured and registered with the provincial government, implanted with government-issued microchip IDs, similar to the ones inserted in pets, and house
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