PUSH FOR RHINO HORN HARVESTING

MBABANE- Could international conventions be preventing Eswatini from tapping into another gold mine?
Rhino horn harvesting, which is banned, could lead to the country making over E3.3 million for each rhino horn.

The money could be invested back to rhino and other wildlife conservation, according to Ted Reilly of the Big Game Parks.
Reilly was speaking during the rhino survival function held at Mlilwane Game Reserve yesterday. Reilly said the average rhino horn weighed four kilogrammes, giving it a value of about E3.37 million on the illegal market. This makes a dead rhino more valuable than a live one. The rhino horn, according to information sourced from the internet, takes only three years to grown back, and can be re-harvested.

The kingdom’s horn trade proposal to be tabled in the upcoming Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) CoP17 failed after the country received only 26 votes out of 126. The country plans to make another proposal in May 2019.

rhino poaching

Reilly said political will was the single most essential ingredient necessary to contain rhino poaching. He said they were blessed with the support of Eswatini’s leadership, hence the country was recognised as having the finest anti-rhino poaching conservation record in Africa. He said another essential requirement was finance.

He took from the words of South African Industrialist, Conservationist and Philanthropist Dr Anton Rupert, who said: “Conservation without finance is merely conversation.”

“It is true that money is the root of all evil, but we cannot do without it. We cannot even eat without it and we certainly cannot conserve without it,” he said.
He said the protection of rhinos was prohibitively expensive and was becoming too costly for many custodians to continue doing it.
“Yet some conservation agencies are sitting on the most valuable self-renewing resource on earth, which they are preventing from utilising by CITES,” he said.

No rhino killing

He said the resource was the rhino horn. He said the horn could be harvested sustainably on an ongoing basis without killing a rhino, because the horn kept growing even after harvesting and its removal from the rhino was painless.

He said despite the horn’s value in the black market, there was no legal commercial value at all because legal trade in rhino horn was banned, despite the fact that the animal did not have to die to legally and repeatedly yield its horn as a self-renewing natural resource.

He said this meant that criminals took all the revenues (from dead rhinos), and the custodians paid the costs of protection. He said this had resulted in 300 000 hectares of habitat formerly available to rhinos being withdrawn from rhino conservation, because it had become too risky and too costly to continue protecting them.
“A friend of mine who was a rhino custodian was shot through the liver and nearly died for protecting rhinos. Another was gang-raped by criminals, while defending orphaned rhinos,” he said.

He told the story of Petros Ngomane, who had received the Rupert Gold medal award for outstanding service to nature conservation. He said on two occasions, attempts were made to assassinate him. He said the first attempt was a brutal attack while Ngomane was on patrol. He said the second attempt was made when a petrol bomb was thrown to him at night.

“Other emaSwati rangers were not so lucky and paid with their lives at the brutal hands of poachers,” he said.
He said custodians who were losing their rhinos to poaching and who believed in the sustainable use of these natural resources had seen their rhinos being plundered by criminals for 41 years under the CITES ban on legal trade.

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