Wild Rhinos Need Our Help

South Africa, home to 80 percent of the world’s rhinos, wants to legalize the rhino horn trade — a plan that will almost certainly doom the animals to extinction.

Imagine an animal the size of a Volkswagen that can keep up with a small Vespa. Picture a hundred in a broad field. Now imagine just one left alive.

That’s what has happened, in essence, over the past century to the population of black rhinos in southern Africa. Where once as many as half a million of these magnificent animals roamed wild, now fewer than 5,000 remain. In 10 years, they could all be gone.

To save them, we must stop the poachers that are slaughtering the last of the world’s wild rhinos for their horns.

Global trafficking in rhino horn has been illegal for four decades. The ban has tamped down but not ended demand. Prized across much of Asia as a luxury item when carved, and for its supposed medicinal benefits when ground into powder, rhino horn can fetch upwards of $25,000 a pound — more than cocaine or gold — on the black market.

Even at those exorbitant prices, powdered rhino horn won’t stop a fever or cure cancer, and there are other materials aplenty that make for beautiful hand-carved ornaments. Now, though, South Africa, home to 80 percent of the world’s remaining rhinos, is weighing a plan to wind back the clock and overturn the ban. The way to protect the world’s rhinos, this odd thinking goes, is to do away with the law that’s meant to protect them.

We need to urge South African President Jacob Zuma to reject the proposal to legalize the blood trade in rhino horn and save these iconic animals from extinction while there’s still time.

The time to speak up is now. The issue is likely to take center stage this September, when Johannesburg hosts the United States and 180 other countries for a world wildlife conference on the global Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES. The convention outlawed global rhino horn sales in 1977. We can’t let opponents lift the ban.

Showcased in safari brochures as one of Africa’s “big five” game animals — along with the lion, elephant, Cape buffalo, and African leopard — the rhinoceros is symbolic of the African wild. On the whole continent, though, no more than 25,000 of these great creatures survive. Each one that does has a bull’s-eye on its hide, hunted by well-organized gangs of poachers who use helicopters, night-vision goggles, high-powered assault rifles, and military tactics to track and kill defenseless rhinos. An especially coveted find: a mother and her young calf, yielding two kills in a single assault.

Last year alone, poachers killed 1,175 of South Africa’s remaining rhinos, 80 more in neighboring Zimbabwe, and another 50 in Namibia, hacking off their horns and leaving the dead or dying animal pitilessly behind. At this rate, a child born today could graduate from college in a world without a single wild rhinoceros.

SAVE WILD RHINOS! Urge South African President Jacob Zuma to scrap his plan to legalize the rhino horn trade.

Nobody wants that kind of a future. That’s why selling rhino horns was prohibited globally in 1977 under CITES. The way to save the rhino is to strengthen those protections and enforce the law, not to rescind it.

A handful of large South African landowners, though, raise rhinos on private property. They carefully saw off portions of a rhino’s horn, which can grow back, like fingernails, as the rhino survives. Whether by “harvesting” horns in this way or by gathering them as rhinos naturally die, some landowners have accumulated large stockpiles of rhino horns.

Now they want the global ban on selling these horns lifted, a move that could net these landowners tens of millions of dollars in sales. Legalizing the global sale of rhino horn, they claim, would drive prices so low that poaching would no longer pay.

However, there’s no sound analysis to suggest that legalizing the sale of rhino horn would drive down its price and stop the poachers. It’s more likely to ease the conscience of potential buyers, drive up demand, and make it easier for poachers to sell their spoils on a free and open market, hastening the rhinos’ demise. It’s possible, too, that putting the horns of farm-raised rhinos on the market would create a kind of premium for wild rhino horn, further driving up the incentive to poach.

Widening the market for a product reliant on a practice you hope to halt turns policy making on its head. The ban sends a powerful signal to consumers, many of whom are deterred from buying rhino horn when they learn it’s been outlawed to protect the species. Legalizing the product would send the opposite message.

And making rhino horn legal won’t put a stop to black markets, as anyone who’s ever bought a fake Rolex knows. Poachers are violent criminals who must be stopped through assertive means. Fluctuations in the world price of rhino horn aren’t likely to send them looking for new work.

The rhinoceros is one of the oldest mammals on the planet, a modern day-link to our prehistoric past, and an essential part of the natural systems upon which all life depends. I don’t want my daughter to know this great animal as something that exists only in musty old copies of National Geographic. I want the rhino to survive.

If you’re with me, please urge President Zuma to stand up for the global ban on rhino horn sales. Let him know we won’t turn away as he signs a death warrant for the last wild rhinos on earth.

It’s time to raise our voices. It’s time to raise our hands. It’s time to say we refuse to sit on the sidelines and watch as one of the great wild creatures of all creation slips into the mist of oblivion.