Rhino Hunting

[okie]

On the positive side , one can conclude that such publicity increases public awareness of poaching and the threat thereof towards extinction of remaining rhino's in this world

[Sprocky]

2014-01-13

Cape Town - A US non-profit organisation has published the name of the person who won an auction to shoot and kill a critically endangered black rhino.

One More Generation made public the name of Corey Knowlton, who reportedly works for US company The Hunting Consortium, on its Facebook page.

Knowlton’s name was withheld in earlier reports after he spent $350 000 to win a permit which will allow him to kill a critically endangered black rhino in Namibia.

The auction has sparked outrage from wildlife conservation groups.

Humane Society International has initiated a petition urging the US Fish and Wildlife Service not to issue the import permit.

According to IUCN estimates, there are approximately 4 800 African black rhino left in the wild.

[Toko]

Conservation group backs killing rare rhino for cash
13:28 14 January 2014 by Fred Pearce

Can it ever be right to auction a licence to shoot a seriously endangered animal like the black rhino? The Dallas Safari Club, a hunters' group based in Texas, did just that last weekend, despite protests from animal rights activists. New Scientist has learned that the club had backing from world's largest association of conservation scientists, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. The IUCN says the killing could increase rhino reproduction in the herd.

Late last year, two specialist IUCN groups wrote letters endorsing the licence to shoot an old male black rhino in Namibia. With numbers 90 per cent lower than three generations ago, the IUCN classifies the black rhino (Diceros bicornis) as "critically endangered". One sub-species, the western black rhino (Diceros bicornis longipipes) was officially declared extinct in 2011.

So why allow the killing of another? One reason is to raise money to save other rhinos. Rosie Cooney of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, who chairs IUCN's sustainable use and livelihoods specialist group, wrote that "trophy hunting... is an effective means to raise much-needed money for rhino conservation".

The $350,000 the anonymous bidder paid for the shooting licence will go into a rhino account run by the government's Namibian Game Products Trust Fund, which channels income from wildlife use, including tourism and hunting licences, into anti-poaching patrols.

Dangerous male

More controversially, the IUCN also claims that the death of this particular rhino could actually boost the growth of the wider population, including metapopulations, geographically separated groups of animals within the same species that still have the opportunity to interact. The winner of the Dallas auction is licensed to kill a specific old male that is no longer fertile and has been expelled by its fellows from Etosha National Park.

"While it appears counter-intuitive, the removal of the odd surplus male... can actually enhance overall metapopulation growth rates and further genetic conservation," wrote Mike Knight of South African National Parks, who chairs IUCN's rhino specialist group.

Knight says such rogue animals get in fights and kill others, including breeding females and calves. Moreover, "female reproductive performance significantly improves as the ratio of adult males to adult females declines, resulting in faster growing populations". Removing a bull that used to dominate breeding in the herd will also reduce the risk of inbreeding.

Not all conservationists agree. Susie Ellis, director of the International Rhino Foundation in Strasburg, Virginia, says the disruptive effect of old males is overstated. "This auction takes attention away from the real issue – that nearly a thousand rhinos were poached last year alone in South Africa."

Conservation by trophy

Wild black rhinos all live in Africa. Due to poaching and habitat loss, their numbers plummeted from 65,000 in 1970 to 2300 in 1993, before recovering to around 5000 today. In Namibia, they have quadrupled since a low point in 1980 to around 1750 animals.

Namibia sees trophy hunting as central to its conservation policies. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species in 2004 gave the country permission to hunt up to five male black rhinos a year. It will sell four licences this year. This one attracted attention because it was auctioned and sold outside the country. The Dallas Safari Club did not respond when approached by New Scientist.

More generally, in a guide to its views on trophy hunting, the IUCN acknowledges its use "as a tool for creating incentives for the conservation of species and their habitats and for the equitable sharing of the benefits of use of natural resources".

The idea of using trophy-hunting to aid conservation has been raised before, especially in the case of lions, but it is mired in controversy.

[Toko]

New laws on rhino hunting

http://www.timeslive.co.za/thetimes/201 ... no-hunting

[Lisbeth]

It is scandalous that rhino hunting is still allowed while they are being poached and now also suffering the drought

[Richprins]

New laws on rhino hunting
Katharine Child | 14 January, 2016 00:18
All rhino deaths, natural or not, have to be reported to the authorities timeously.


The Department of Environmental Affairs has drafted regulations to strengthen control over the sale of live rhinos, trophy hunting and the stockpiling of rhino horn.

Rhino hunting is legal in South Africa if the hunter has a permit but the proposed law stipulates than an environmental management official would have to be present at all hunts.

The law was gazetted on Tuesday and is open for public comment for 30 days.

The proposed regulations include:

One hunter will be allowed to hunt only one rhino a year;
All rhino deaths, natural or not, have to be reported to the authorities timeously;
All rhino sold or moved must have three microchips implanted - one in each horn and another in the spine;
Provincial authorities must keep information about rhino deaths and the movement of rhino out of the province on a national database;
Rhino owners must notify government officials within five days of acquiring horns from a natural death; and
Owners must keep the horns in a safe.

The chairman of the Private Rhino Owners' Association, Pelham Jones, said owners were already micro chipping their rhinos to reduce the risk of poaching and to trace the horn.

Rhino owner Ed Hern, commenting on the requirement that officials be present on hunts, said: "The provincial authorities don't have enough staff to do that."

Hern has micro-chipped 300 of his live rhinos and infused poison and dye into their horns to make them unusable as traditional medicines.

[Richprins]

Very few owners would want government officials anywhere near their businesses, as far as possible. Not for secrecy, but because of corruption, unfortunately...

[Lisbeth]

Which makes the presence of a government official of no use

[okie]

Rhino owner Ed Hern, commenting on the requirement that officials be present on hunts, said: "The provincial authorities don't have enough staff to do that."

How many thousands of rhino are hunted per year

[Toko]

http://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/ ... upLj_nhDIU

Op-Ed: Rhino hunting is not compatible with conservation
DAVID BILCHITZ AFRICA 14 MAR 2016 01:57 (SOUTH AFRICA)

South Africa’s official approach to rhino conservation involves a contradiction. While calling for the protection of rhinos as a species, it promotes their use as a resource to be exploited for human gain. It is bound to fail. By DAVID BILCHITZ.

Despite the devastating loss of 1,175 rhinos to poaching last year, environmental affairs minister Edna Molewa recently refused to impose a moratorium on the issuing of hunting permits for rhinos.

Her response to the call issued by a civil society group emphasised that interventions to address rhino poaching and illegal horn trade did not preclude what she termed the “legal, sustainable utilisation of the species”.

She insisted that the legal international trade in live rhino and the export of hunting trophies poses a low risk to the survival of the species in South Africa and should be allowed to continue. In this, she is tragically wrong. There is an extremely close link between legal hunting and poaching, which the minister is unwilling to acknowledge.

In her approach, the minister views rhinos instrumentally — that they only matter to the extent that they are useful to humans. By this ethic, individual animals have no moral worth other than in terms of the money we can gain from their lives (through tourism) and their deaths (through hunting). Conservation, for the minister, is only about ensuring there will be rhinos in the future that we can exploit.

Those who poach simply take these ideas to their logical conclusions. If animals are just things to be exploited for our self-interest, then why not kill them when there are large profits to be gained? Why should poor individuals in Mozambique refrain from killing rhinos to support their families when wealthy Americans are granted permits to shoot them on the game farms of wealthy South Africans?

An ethic that simply reduces animals to instruments for human ends will inevitably have a hard time convincing people that animals should be conserved for future uses. If their short-term needs are pressing, or there’s an economic crisis, there is little reason to think about the long term.

The perspective articulated by Molewa (shared by many others purportedly seeking conservation in these narrow terms) also makes the strange claim that individuals do not really matter as long as the whole species survives. Yet this view fails to explain why species preservation is good in itself. And it remains hard to see how one can promote conservation of a broad, abstract concept such as a species without respecting the individuals who comprise it.

The Department of Environmental Affairs is increasingly veering in the direction of this contradictory and exploitative ethic which only values animals as a commodity. It continues to distance itself, for instance, from the departmental Norms and Standards approach adopted in relation to elephants in 2008 which recognises the relationship between the interests of individual animals and wider environmental concerns.

The department has, in fact, been attempting to edit this document to remove references to the welfare, sentience and social nature of elephants. And it has failed to pass any further regulations to stop the growth of canned lion hunting.

An alternative view recognises that an essential part of an effective conservation strategy involves developing an understanding of the worth of and respect owed to individual animals. This is important, not only because morally animals are deserving of such respect in their own right, but also because respect for individual animals is essential to preserving the species as a whole. The one cannot be divorced from the other.

By this approach the species will always be preserved where individual animals can only be used in a manner that is compatible with demonstrating respect for their lives (such as the viewing of animals in their natural environment).

South Africa’s rich wildlife heritage is imperilled unless our policies and practices are rooted in respect for the individual interests and welfare of animals. This requires, for instance, that a moratorium be imposed on rhino trophy hunting. South Africa needs to send a clear message that we care about the animals that share our land for their own sake, not simply for the pursuit of profit. DM

David Bilchitz is a Professor at the University of Johannesburg and Director of the South African Institute for Advanced Constitutional, Public, Human Rights and International Law (SAIFAC). He is also Secretary-General of the International Association of Constitutional Law. He has presented a more academic version of this argument at a conference at Harvard University on Animals and the Constitution, which is available here http://www.uj.ac.za/faculties/law/saifa ... erests.pdf