Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade

by Rademeyer, Julian

  In Uganda, the murderous dictatorship of Idi Amin – in which half a million people were killed between 1971 and 1979 – also saw wildlife, including rhino, being slaughtered on an unimaginable scale. The Tanzanian soldiers who ended Amin’s bloody rule continued the killing.

  Tanzania itself lost half its rhino population. In the north of the country, where poaching was rife, 80 per cent of the rhino population was wiped out. In 1973, there were between 4 000 and 8 000 rhinos in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley. By the early 1980s, only 1 500 were left. Elsewhere, the picture was equally bleak. In Angola, there were said to be only 200 rhinos left; Mozambique, 300; Zimbabwe, 1 400; Chad, twenty; Uganda, possibly twelve; and Rwanda, between twenty and forty.

  At the beginning of the 1970s, there were an estimated 65 000 black rhino in Africa. A quarter of a century later, only 2 400 remained. In 1982, the conservationist, Esmond Bradley Martin, wrote grimly: ‘Over the last 160 years 95 per cent of the entire African rhino population has been lost. Even more alarming is the fact that there were twice as many African rhinos in 1970 as in 1980.’

  In July 1975, the CITES treaty formally took effect. South Africa was the fifteenth country to ratify it. (It is worth noting that China became a member in 1981, Thailand in 1983, Vietnam in 1994 and Laos only in 2004.) CITES is an environmental trade agreement, nothing more.

  Today the convention has 175 signatories. Intended to ensure that transactions involving wild animals and plants do not threaten their survival, it is heavily dependent on self-regulation by the signatories. In many ways, CITES is only as good as the information it receives from member states, which enables it to track and evaluate trade. CITES officially meets every three years to debate proposals put forward by the various states. The next ‘conference of parties’ is scheduled for March 2013.

  CITES requires that each member-country enacts national legislation that gives effect to the convention and ensures that trade is monitored and policed. Any exports of endangered or threatened wildlife products must travel with CITES-compliant export paperwork issued by the originating country. Corresponding paperwork is required from the importing country.

  Animal rights activists, like Pickover, claim it is a ‘weak treaty, promoting trade rather than preventing it’. The Green Movement often refers to CITES as the ‘animal dealer’s charter’.

  ‘Unscrupulous traders take advantage of its many loopholes and its lack of power to enforce minimum standards of compliance,’ Pickover writes. These include ‘inadequate national laws and feeble implementation, and the general lack of political will … Fraud, corruption and abuse are rife, including the forging of documents and the issuing of re-export certificates for smuggled specimens.’

  Michael ’t Sas-Rolfes, an economist best known for his arguments in favour of legalising trade in rhino horn, has a contrary view on why CITES is ‘very limited in its potential effectiveness as a conservation tool’.

  ‘As it is currently structured, CITES primarily operates as a restrictive mechanism, rather than an enabling one. Implicit in its existing structure is an assumption that all trade is somehow bad for conservation unless proven otherwise.’

  By 1977, in response to the poaching crisis in Africa and Asia and a massive decline in rhino populations, trade in rhino horn was banned. All species of rhino were classified under CITES Appendix I: Animals and plants that are threatened with extinction and are prohibited from being traded except in rare instances. Exports to zoos and museums for non-commercial educational or scientific purposes were still permitted.

  In South Africa, trophy hunting remained an exception to the rule. The import and export of personal ‘sport-hunted’ trophies was classed as ‘non-commercial’ trade. Trophy hunting was seen as a necessary means of controlling rhino populations. And it brought in money that, in theory, would benefit conservation. At least 820 white rhino are believed to have been hunted between 1968, when trophy hunting of white rhino resumed, and 1994 – an average of about thirty a year. From 1995 to 2011, a further 1 300 were shot in trophy hunts.

  The 1977 CITES trade ban assumed that demand for rhino horn products would gradually fade and, with it, poaching would cease. Instead, the black-market price for rhino horn skyrocketed. In Taiwan, for instance, a kilogram of rhino horn could be bought for US$17 in 1977. By 1980 – just three years later – it cost US$477. In Yemen, where rhino horn was used to make the ornate hilts of ceremonial jambiya daggers, the price nearly doubled between 1980 and 1985, from US$764 a kilogram to US$1159. And poaching continued unabated.

  Over the next seventeen years, various increasingly stringent resolutions were adopted to try to halt the illegal trade, but with little effect. In 1994, South Africa pushed CITES to ‘down-list’ the southern white rhino population and legalise trade.

  ‘The strategy of banning all trade in rhinoceros products has … failed to provide any significant protection to rhinoceros populations in the wild and should be discarded as a viable conservation measure,’ it said in its proposal. South Africa argued that while large-scale poaching continued elsewhere in Africa and Asia, its own rhino populations were stable and flourishing. (At the time, the country had about 6 000 white rhino, up from only 3 800 in 1984. By 2011, the population had grown to an estimated 18 800.)

  CITES should allow ‘controlled utilisation’ of rhinos, it said. This would include regulated trade in horn, skin and toenails from natural mortalities, the slaughter of seriously sick and post-reproductive animals for a ‘wide range of rhino products’, and the commercial ranching of rhinos for their horn.

  ‘Revenue accrued from the sale of rhinoceros products will be available to maintain and improve the conservation management programmes on which the various rhinoceros species depend.’

  The submission was sharply criticised by environmentalists. Newspapers ridiculed it. ‘End tables made from elephant ears. Designer boots fashioned from rhino skin. If officials here [in South Africa] have their way, such goods, now illegal, could soon be coming to a mall near you,’ read one unbelieving report from the Knight News Service.

  South Africa’s call for the unbanning of trade failed to garner the necessary support. But CITES members were prepared to allow for the ‘down-listing’ of white rhinos from Appendix I to Appendix II: species that are not currently threatened with extinction but may become so unless trade is strictly regulated. This would enable limited commercial trade in live specimens to ‘appropriate and acceptable destinations’. In 2004, the down-listing was extended to Swaziland, and both countries were allowed limited quotas of black rhinos to hunt.

  South Africa made another bid to push for the legalisation of trade at the 1997 CITES conference in Harare. According to Sonja Meintjes, who attended the meeting, ‘The conference was overshadowed by issues around elephants and ivory. The voting was by a show of hands. In order for their votes to be counted, the parties had to be present in the room. There was a mishap and some of the people we counted on were not there. We lost by one vote.’

  South Africa’s relationship with CITES has been prickly. The country’s past track record of compliance with CITES requirements has been described as ‘abysmal’. In 1992, the CITES secretariat announced a far-reaching national legislation project that was designed to ensure that all participating countries enacted national laws that met the basic requirements of the convention. Five years later, South Africa was warned that it faced a blanket trade suspension if it did not comply. But the country continued to miss deadline after deadline. It would be another seven years before South Africa finally enacted national legislation and a further six years before adequate regulations were put in place.

  A 1996 report by TRAFFIC found that while South Africa had ‘earned a positive reputation for conserving native wildlife’, this was ‘being undermined by the government’s inability to adequately control trade in wild animal and plant species’.

  Significantly, TRAFFIC criticised the ‘poor quality control’ around the issuance of CITES permits an
d South Africa’s annual reports to CITES, which ‘showed numerous cases where permit information was inaccurately or incompletely reflected’. It also highlighted ‘poor co-ordination and information sharing’, and investigations ‘characterised by informal communications rather than formalised co-operation … [which] often owe more to good will and individual personalities than necessity’.

  And it found fault with the ‘compartmentalised nature of provincial wildlife trade controls’, which were ‘neither efficient nor effective’. Sixteen years later, many of the complaints persist.

  ‘For many years, South Africa’s CITES compliance was extremely poor,’ says David Newton, regional director for TRAFFIC East and southern Africa. ‘But there has been quite a dramatic improvement in recent years. There has been a sharp improvement in the skills available and there is a lot of interest from government to make sure their bases are covered, and they seem very willing to entertain ideas and adopt measures.’

  As recently as 2010, the country came ‘within a cat’s whisker’ of trade sanctions being imposed for its failure to publish national CITES regulations.

  ‘The government really dragged its feet over that legislation,’ says Newton. ‘It moved dreadfully slowly and took years to enact.’

  The threat of a blanket trade ban saw the regulations hastily gazetted on 5 March 2010, just eight days before the fifteenth CITES conference of parties, which was held in Qatar.

  ‘There were mistakes. It wasn’t perfect,’ Newton says. Even now, in 2012, South Africa remains on a short leash and CITES has flagged the country for attention because of the high levels of poaching, inadequate reporting of numbers of rhinos and horn stockpiles on private land, and pseudo-hunting. South Africa still has some way to go before it will be regarded as a ‘Category 1’ or ‘fully compliant member state’.

  Newton says the lack of a centralised computer database to manage permits is a matter of grave concern. ‘For years there has been talk about a system linking all nine provinces. The software was specially developed for the country twelve years ago and never implemented. It is probably out of date by now, and apparently the software developer left the country and the department forgot to buy the code.’

  Says Meintjes, ‘At the end of the 1990s, there was a Danish project to develop an integrated electronic permitting system. Our IT people were not involved at the beginning and only came in during the last phases. They discovered they couldn’t marry it with our existing system. And by then the consultant who [had] developed it had left for the United States and we didn’t have the intellectual property rights to make changes to it.

  ‘We have been working on it forever. We tried one company, but they couldn’t deliver. We had a working group that also looked at three existing systems, but none of them can be integrated into our system. Limpopo, for instance, has paid a lot of money to a company from India to develop a system for them. But it’s not even up and running yet and it’s already full of glitches.’

  Properly implemented, the technology would enable the department to monitor the issuing of permits in real time, and extract data that could identify anomalies, detect new trends, and prevent the type of permit abuses that accompanied the Vietnamese and Thai pseudo-hunts.

  ‘We need a business-analysis system where we can gather information and analyse it,’ says Meintjes. ‘We need to be able to flag instances where, for instance, someone like Dawie Groenewald applies for a permit.’

  In June 2012, the department was still trying to find funding for the project and proposals were ‘with senior management to be signed’.

  Another key challenge remains the ungainly provincial nature conservation ordinances that have for so long formed the backbone of CITES implementation in the country. They differ, sometimes markedly, from province to province. As inconsistent, patchwork laws, they often serve to undermine any efforts at cohesive hunting and wildlife trade policies.

  ‘It would have been much easier if nature conservation was a national-government competency,’ says Meintjes. ‘But it isn’t and it will most likely not be changed in the near future. That makes things difficult, because we now have to co-ordinate with all nine provinces. We’re trying our utmost best, but it isn’t easy.’

  The national department’s ability to intervene, even in provinces like North West, where abuses appear to have been rife, is limited, says Meintjes. ‘It is not our job … It is the provincial department that must take disciplinary steps or conduct audits … If [officials] tamper with the permits they issue to the public, we can’t investigate that. The South African police must investigate that. If a province can’t fulfil its function, then the national minister can step in and take over that function. But then there’s a whole process that has to be followed.’

  Adri Kitshoff, the CEO of PHASA, says provincial ordinances are ‘unmanageable’. ‘National government issues norms and standards to the nine provinces, but each province legislates itself. Some provinces are stricter than others. It is unmanageable.’

  Professional hunters are required to be registered in accordance with the regulation of the province in which they hunt. To hunt in all nine provinces, a PH has to apply for registration nine times.

  ‘To operate, he has to do his training and then write a practical exam and apply for a hunting licence.’

  Kitshoff attributes some of the legal infractions by hunters to the un wieldy nature of the hunting regulations. ‘We would like to see one national system. If the government makes it difficult for you to do things correctly, then it becomes a case of impossibility. Say I go and hunt in Kwa-Zulu-Natal and I don’t realise that I need a hunting licence – I would actually be hunting illegally.’

  Provincial nature conservation offices that issue hunting permits are also open to abuse. Corruption is said to be rife, particularly in North West and Limpopo provinces. Personal relationships quickly develop between professional hunters, game farmers and provincial conservation officers. Often, they move in the same small circles. In one province, for instance, officials had been stranded without working vehicles. Because regulations require that a conservation official be present during a rhino hunt, the game farmers would arrange to pick them up the evening before a hunt and accommodate them overnight so that they could go out with the hunting party at first light.

  Chris Mercer, a retired advocate who has championed efforts to outlaw the canned hunting of lions, says that ‘the hunting industry and provincial conservation officials are often one and the same’, and compares their oversight role to ‘asking Al Capone’s henchmen to monitor his activities’.

  It takes a particular sort of hunter to shoot a rhino. You have to be rich – unless, of course, you are on an all-expenses paid holiday courtesy of a crime syndicate. Killing a rhino doesn’t pose much of a challenge, so you have to be in it for the trophy. Trophy hunters are collectors. Each head is a notch on an unwritten list. A hunter who hunts the Big Five wants all their heads on a wall. For some, it becomes an obsession. In the case of a rhino, whether you’re a trophy hunter or pseudo-hunter, it is all about the horn. For many hunters, though, a rhino hunt remains an unchallenging and unpalatable exercise.

  Shooting a rhino is ‘about as sporting as shooting a horse’, Bradley Martin once wrote. The late professor Charles Guggisberg, a naturalist who lived for years in Kenya studying its rhinos, regarded hunting as ‘a good sport’, but felt ‘its participants should never become accomplices in the extermination of a rapidly diminishing species … To go out in a Land Rover, accompanied by a highly efficient professional hunter, in order to shoot an animal which is under heavy pressure from poachers … can hardly be rated as a sporting achievement’. Even Dawie Groenewald – who claims he has never hunted a rhino himself – says he fails to see the challenge in taking one of them down.

  Former US president Theodore Roosevelt, who hunted rhinos on a bloody safari with his son Kermit in what was then British East Africa in the early 1900s, said that he considered the ‘rhin
oceros the least dangerous of all real dangerous game, although many good hunters hold the contrary view’. Frederick Selous, the nineteenth- and twentieth-century British explorer and hunter, described white rhino as the ‘most harmless and inoffensive of beasts’ and black rhinos as ‘by no means the surly, morose and dangerous beast that some travellers would have one believe. They are, as a rule, very easy to shoot on horseback … They die very quickly when shot through the lungs or the upper part of the heart; but if shot from in front, and a bullet perforates one lung, they will go on to all eternity, though throwing blood out of their mouth and nostrils by the gallon.’

  Peter Hathaway Capstick, the American hunter and author whose books influenced a generation of hunters in the 1970s and 1980s, wrote that rhinos are ‘the only critters that really give me a sense of sadness to hunt. Except in a charge, they are relatively easy to flatten with a bullet of proper size, and with the passing of each one, I have a terrible, hollow feeling of having smashed a priceless artefact … Today he’s like an arthritic, old soldier, a one-too-many-fight boxer who is losing his battle for survival. He’s dimwitted right off the bottom of the scale, a non-achiever in the changing struggle for existence.’

  Aside from Asian syndicates, South Africa has attracted its share of unscrupulous rhino hunters, from Eastern European gangsters and businessmen with suspected ties to Vory v Zakone, or Thieves in Law – the Russian mob – to the playboy son of slain Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and the son of a former American presidential candidate.

  Hunting records show that Saadi Gaddafi – footballer, businessman and all-round ‘black sheep of the Gaddafi family’ – hunted and killed two rhinos in 2009 and 2010. The first hunt took place in the Bojanelo District of North West province some time between 16 and 22 May 2009, three months after Saadi’s father was elected chairman of the African Union. In the same year, Saadi visited the Masai Mara National Reserve in Kenya and reportedly ‘threw a tantrum’ when he was refused permission to hunt there.