A rhino’s not just for life
My eyes were opened by a comment by our safari guide Gerhard in the Marakele National Park, South Africa.
On an evening drive, the Land Cruiser stops near a couple of White Rhinos. Gerhard turns to the honeymooning couple in our group and says, “Enjoy this sight, because your children probably won’t”. “Rhinos are so close to extinction because of poaching,” he continues, “that they most likely won’t be with us when your children are old enough to come on safari.”
As he explains, the maths are not in favour of the animal: calves are born one at a time at an interval of about three years, half the time being gestation, the rest the time the mother takes to look after the new-born before she next comes into season. So bearing in mind females are half the population, it takes six rhino years to recover from a single animal being poached.
Despite its enormous size, Marakele Park is impressively protected, surrounded by an electric fence, guards at every gate and armed anti-poaching patrols. But last time the poachers struck, they killed four rhinos, equivalent to a loss of 24 rhino years, and the population is still recovering. The situation is apparently worse at less well protected parks like the Kruger.
To our group of first world tourists, a first world-type solution seems obvious: deter the poachers with stiffer sentences, lock them up for longer, fine them lots of money, and so on. It’s also the wrong solution.
The poachers are mostly experienced native bushmen, who know the parks like the back of their hands, but who are also poor and with few other skills, and little prospect of work. They know what they are doing is wrong, but they risk prison to make enough money from taking and selling a single rhino horn to feed their families for perhaps a year.
Most of the money is in fact made by the traffickers, helped by corrupt officials, who smuggle the horns out of the country to Asia, where there is a seemingly insatiable demand for the horns alleged ability to do everything from giving a man an erection, to curing cancer. Governments give the impression of tackling the problem by locking up poachers, but do little to stop the trade. Perhaps they don’t care, or perhaps they are complicit. Neither is acceptable.
It might seem to be a question of ignorance, greed and superstition (a powerful and toxic mix), but in fact this is more about poverty, corruption and negligence. Until governments in Africa make it illegal to own, buy, sell, trade or handle rhino horn, backed up with stiff sentences for the traffickers and corrupt officials, supply will continue. And until governments in Asia educate their peoples that Rhino horn is made of nothing more magical than the same substance as a human nail, demand will continue.
What can we safari tourists do? Educate ourselves, inform others, pressure our governments and donate to one of the charities that fight for rhinos. And switch our business to those countries and resorts that are fighting for the survival of these magnificent creatures. We might then have something for our children and their children to admire and enjoy.
Rhinos should be for eternity, not just for our lifetime.
