I tried rhino horn a couple of times years ago. It didn't work as an aphrodisiac, didn't cure my headaches or 'flu' and tasted of acorns that had been in a cow barn too long.
Then a billion people tell me it does work. Why do these myths prevail? Is superstition more powerful than Nurofen and the power of suggestion better for us than antibiotics? I can't go down those roads. It seems to me that early education has to incorporate respect for our planet and the creatures that we share it with or we, as just another creature, will share the fate we are doling out to them.
In the long run we must be doomed. History will repeat itself and Mother Nature will get her own back. But that's too pessimistic and plays into the argument of 'why bother'. Why bother indeed? Who cares about where we came from, when we are moving forwards so fast and everything has to be so immediately gratifying.
Many people do care. Many countries do care. It is often said, usually by the office-bound NGO and UN types, that Africans are indifferent to the fate of Wildlife in their own countries. This is absolutely untrue. They believe passionately about their wildlife and their wilderness as part of their heritage, as well as a major part of their economic future.
Our Rhino Sanctuary in Mkomazi is policed by a Dad's Army of retrenched Tanzanian Army soldiers who once chased Idi Amin out of Uganda. Now they look after their own Rhino and risk their lives daily for very little pay.
Mkomazi was degraded by pastoralism and poaching in the 70s and 80-s. Now it is a re-born wilderness and if the book I wrote last year is testimony to anything it is about this reversal and the fact that the environmental crisis can be stopped. All of us can look back with pride that we inherited a stock and tsetse fly burnt out piece of Africa, and ended up with a National Park.
The knowledge that animals have characters, personalities and feelings and the ability to communicate in as many profound and complex ways as our own is integral to the way I feel about the environment. Without embarking on any anthropomorphic rubbish it is possible to know that wild animals are not so divorced from the complexities of our own beings.
Teeth and claws, trunks and horns, stings and poisons they do have, but they have little voice in our expanding, troubled and concrete-paved world. We must use OUR voices and OUR strengths to begin to live alongside them once again or we will lose a huge part of ourselves, our past and our future forever.
I have lost many friends and associates to the guns of poachers. Men and women who gave their lives for what they believed in and what they felt was right. They had a sense of their place on the planet and paid the ultimate price.
Others got richer, fatter and greedier as the thousands of rhinos and elephants went down in a hail of bullets or slowly to the effects of poison. Lions, leopards and hyenas gasping for life as the cattle dips and insecticides of the western world did their worst. The birds that fed on the carcasses were numerous and now so many areas have become the lands where no vultures fly.
I inherited a beautiful world that was full of wildlife and where there was room for people and them to co-exist. There is still that space, that room, but we don't care. It's all about us and that immediate gain. And we shall leave a devastated planet for future generations and they will blame us for their grief.
I will not allow my children to ask me the question "You knew what was going on , Dad, why didn't you do something?"
And I am asking the same question of you.
I have never jumped on the " It's finished unless.." or the sob-story crowd, heartrending tales of a tragic individual or fudged the figures to make what I do look better but right now I will use all three and anything else I can dream up because the pressure on Africa is immense.
It cannot be co-incidence that this pressure has coincided with the return and expansion of the Chinese in Africa in their search for natural resources and their self-serving "aid programmes". But pressure there has to come from a much higher level than mine, but where are those voices?
In the field we just have to look to better management, better security, better organisations, better education and a more fearless approach to issues and governments.
But we are the non earning sector. Sure Parks and Reserves can become great income earners, but the central governments need income, too and the private sector must play its' part and fill in the gaps.
RhiNOremedy is founded on insight, dedication and the experience to make sure your help goes to where it will be most effective and actually work. RhiNOremedy; good name and a good group of people - they are in it for the animals.
Help this organization, it will help us. And I've just made you a promise.
Thank You.
Statement for RhiNOremedy byTony Fitzjohn OBE, Mkomazi National Park, Tanzania.
Here in Asia, some innocent person is lying in a bed dying of cancer. They and their loved ones are desperate for a cure. They are prepared, as we all would, to try anything that might postpone the inevitable. They reach out with hope; hoping for a miracle. They spend a small fortune for this miracle, driven by their desperation. In the end, this person, their loved one, dies, along with the rhino that had unwillingly offered up its horn to satisfy their desperate but false hope.
The sad part is that no one wins. The family loses their loved one, whose only real chance for survival rested in getting professional medical treatment.
The rhino loses it life because of the criminals that sell false hope to desperate and unknowing people.
Members of this vast dark criminal network are fixed on wiping out every last of one of the world's most charismatic group of species for greedy profits. These people are still out there, walking around free, as the rhino, and undoubtedly the patient would rather be.
Saving the rhino cannot possibly be, until we round up the merchants of false hope and undo the myth that drives innocent people to kill rhinos in vain.
Statement for RhiNOremedy by ENV: Education for Nature, Vietnam.
East Asian 'pseudo sport hunters' have been going to South Africa in increasing numbers in the last four years or so to hunt white rhinos for trophy horns. They have been bringing the horns back to sell in Vietnam. While CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) allows trophy rhino horns to be exported from South Africa, it does not permit the horns to be sold for commercial purposes as this only fuels the illegal trade in rhino horn.
From 1972 to 2004 an average of 36 white rhinos were legally sport hunted a year in South Africa. It cost a client about USD 32, 000 per rhino hunt. From 2005 to 2008 86 white rhinos were sport hunted, and by 2009 the figure was 100. The traditional American and European sport hunters by then had been largely ousted by East Asian pseudo hunters who have no tradition in hunting for trophies to hang on their walls. About 90% of the hunts were being carried out by East Asians, especially the Vietnamese, compared to only 15% in 2005. The reason for this was that they were willing to pay three times more to legally kill a rhino and were paying the professional hunter per kilo for the horn as opposed to the traditional up front trophy fee and daily rates! The South African government tried to control this by taking out a moratorium allowing only one rhino to be sport hunted per person. To get around this, some of these East Asians have started to employ Thai prostitutes to go on the hunts and pose as hunters in order for them to receive licenses for the horns for export as legal trophies. This scam, with the escalating price for hunted rhinos - in other words their horns Ð has been encouraging poaching.
The figures speak for themselves. In South Africa, from 2000 to 2007 there were about 15 rhinos poached each year, but in 2008 there were 83 poached rhinos which doubled in 2009, and by 2010 there were 333 rhinos poached in South Africa, 448 in 2011. The rate in 2012 doesn't appear to be slowing. Rhinos are being killed on both public and private land, and sometimes they die in agony with their horns hacked off before the animal is dead. There has been a rise in poaching in Zimbabwe and Kenya also, as across the continent poachers are learning of the higher prices the East Asians are prepared to pay. The Namibian government is anxiously aware this problem may well spread to their country also.
Certain Chinese, Vietnamese and Thais are known to be involved in both pseudo sport hunting and trading in illegal horns from poached rhinos in Africa. Their growing wealth has fuelled a keener interest in acquiring rhino horns. It can sell (for traditional Chinese medicine) for USD 20,000/kg retail in the pharmacists of Vietnam, for example. There is also prestige associated with consuming rhino horn in Vietnam and China, as it demonstrates their new great wealth. The Chinese are buying many luxury goods at exorbitant prices and rhino horn is just one of these items that they are prepared to pay a huge amount for. This trend must be reversed if rhinos are to survive in their remaining scattered and small areas of Africa, not to mention Asia. The world's five rhino species are under growing threat from poachers to meet the demand for their horns in East Asia.
A cooperative and concerted effort is needed at every level to find out how best to reduce the demand for rhino horn and to improve the protection of rhinos in the wild. It is a catastrophe that rhinos are being poached in such large numbers and that there seems at the moment no end to the demand for rhino horn in East Asia for traditional Chinese medicine.
Statement for RhiNOremedy by Lucy Vigne, rhino researcher, Kenya.
It is a tragedy that whole species and sub-species, especially those as magnificent and special as rhinos may go extinct in our lifetimes. It is even more tragic and frustrating when many of the end users of the horn, for which the rhinos are being killed, are themselves being duped and the only person really gaining is the middle man making money! Many natural and traditional medicines have real value in healing, but it has been proven that rhino horn has almost no value in fever reduction and certainly none in curing cancer as is currently being purported. Sick people are dying because they are not being given effective medicine and rhinos are dying for fallacies. Those of us who have spent our lives fighting to conserve rhinos and the myriad other animals and plants that share their ecosystems in the wonderful "protected areas" of the world know the challenges we are up against. Many people have even lost their own lives in the fight. But many more rhinos and elephants have been slaughtered for the profit of a few.
The best way to count and monitor rhinos is through individual recognition, which makes it even more poignant. I knew all the rhinos I have studied and helped protect over the years. They all had names, and I followed their generations and the soap opera of their lives over the years. When the balance in the struggle between rangers and poachers shifts, pushed by commercial pressures, wars, corruption and lawlessness and where what was once a mother and calf roaming free, becomes and bloody hacked up head and a tiny hornless skull it is torture...... and for what have they died??
Each of us can only do our part in the bigger picture of tackling this problem at all levels. I commend RhiNORemedy and hope this can work to become a really effective force for the conservation of what remains of our wonderful rhinos and other species exploited for supposed "medicinal qualities".
Statement for RhiNOremedy by Kes-Hillman Smith, Original AFRSG chair and rhino expert.
I think there comes a time (or more) in everyone's career when they have to make hard decisions, when their efforts have become fruitless and perhaps are even failing more than when they started. In terms of wildlife conservation and animal welfare, humans are at a tipping point. We either decide we are going to respect the precious others on our planet, or also go the way of all the other creatures we persecute.
There comes a time when respect for damaging cultural practices must be faced and encouraged to change. In terms of gross consumption habits by "Western" cultures, we have to make changes - our practices are killing all the animals of the world as we take and take and take - and leave nothing for them. In terms ancient medicinal practices, while this amazing knowledge should be respected and honored, there is no longer room for these practices on this human-dominated planet. There are simply too many of us making too steep a demand. In terms of cultural totems such as rhino horn dagger handles, this also needs to be addressed and practitioners need to be open to using other materials.
The West needs to set the example and we have to hope the rest of the world is willing to keep an open mind - for the sake of all animals, including us. Pointing fingers at others in blame for losses of wildlife is wasted energy - we all must look within ourselves and live with compassion and foresight, and set good examples for the children of Earth.
Statement for RhiNOremedy by Sarah Bexell, Chengdu Research base of Giant Panda Breeding &University of Denver
