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Rhinos Wanted – Dead or Alive

WRITTEN BY JOHN GROBLER AND KHADIJA SHARIFE

Major gaps between South African and Namibian legislation that regulates the endangered species trade allowed for the sale of at least 13 white rhino bulls from a South African game park to a Russian big game hunting outfit in Namibia. Nine of these rhinos were found to have died.

The sale was part of a controversial 2013 deal -- which raised an outcry at the time -- that saw a total of 260 of the endangered rhinos sold from South Africa’s Kruger National Park.

By itself, selling white rhinos is not an unusual practice. It’s a conservation strategy intended to raise money for parks, reduce poaching, and diversify the genetic pool by creating satellite populations in better-protected areas.

But a new investigation by Oxpeckers and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) reveals that, in this case, something went dramatically wrong.

The fate of the rhinos that ended up in Namibia, the deaths of dozens more that were sold to South African breeding farms, and irregularities in the approval of the sale point to serious problems in how the conservation of endangered species is regulated -- and highlight the ability of powerful individuals to skirt the rules to their benefit.

 Worth More Dead Than Alive?

Once on the brink of extinction, the South African population of white rhinos numbers about 22,000 (about 90 percent of the world total) as of 2010. Of these, some 75 percent are based in reserves such as Kruger National Park, while the remainder are housed on private land.

The recovery is thanks, in part, to the policy of SANParks, the country’s national parks agency, of sustainably selling rhinos to the commercial breeding industry to maintain genetic diversity.

That’s why, though the hunting of the animals for sport has a long and controversial history, many acknowledge that it has its place in conservation.

“In short, if there are no financial incentives for the private sector to breed white rhino, there might be a lot less investment overall,” explained Namibian rhino specialist Dr. Pierre du Preez.

But the hunting industry has recently been infiltrated by a set of actors with a different agenda -- killing the animals only in order to obtain and sell their horns.

“It’s sad, but rhinos are often worth more dead than alive,” says Namibian rhino breeder Jaco Muller.

That’s because the horns are worth more than the actual rhino. Each kilogram can fetch as much as US$ 100,000 -- ultimately, as much as $300,000 per horn. The destination is China, where the horns are used to carve ornamental libation cups denoting superior social standing, or to Vietnam, where they are used as a hangover cure by the super-rich. The left-over bits are used in traditional Chinese medicine to cure everything from high blood pressure to rheumatism.

About 1,000 rhinos have been killed every year in South Africa in resurgent poaching -- illegal hunting -- since 2009. Most of these deaths take place in areas that straddle transnational borders, such as Kruger National Park.

Traditionally, such poaching has been carried out by organized crime cartels, which earn profits on the horns and use them for portable wealth. 

But, as this investigation reveals, it’s not just illegal poachers that are the problem. People charged with protecting the animals are sometimes able to make use of gaps in legal regulations to profit from selling the animals, which in some cases leads to their deaths.

A number of rules govern the cross-border trade in rhinos between Namibia and South Africa, including local regulations in each country. Both countries are also party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the oldest international conservation agreement that legally binds the voluntary participants.

South Africa has an additional set of Threatened or Protected Species (TOPS) laws that oversee the trade in endangered species.

These regulations prohibit the export of rhinos for anything but breeding or broader conservation purposes, and also prohibit hunting any rhino within three years of its being moved from an open to an enclosed area. But, as du Preeze explains, such regulations are not legally enforceable in neighboring Namibia, which does not have a large indigenous rhino population. This is the loophole that has been exploited for the sake of handsome profits for South African and Russian billionaires. 

It has also brought to light a fundamental problem in commercial breeding of white rhinos: Half of every annual cohort are males, for which there are no real markets except to be sold to the hunting industry as trophies.

Kruger’s Rhino for Kruger’s Rand

With an area of nearly two million hectares, the Kruger National Park in South Africa’s northern region is one of the continent’s largest game reserves. It is also where the most white rhinos have been poached since 2008.

In 2013, SANParks made a controversial decision to sell 500 white rhinos (later reduced to 260) to South African private game farms that were involved in the sports-hunting industry. Oxpeckers reported at the time that a SANpark official, Dr. Hector Magome, had acted improperly in overseeing the deal, and that he had been suspended as a result.

Selling excess rhino bulls to be hunted is nothing new in the trophy hunting industry. Through special auctions and carefully curated and regulated sales, parks such as Kruger are allowed sell rhinos explicitly for hunting.

But that’s not what happened in this case.

According to documents obtained by OCCRP from a private investigator who specializes in rhino protection, the deal with the breeders appears to have been personally negotiated by Magome, rather than proceeding through the SANParks board, as is required for sales of over R10 million ($860,000).

Among the three South African breeders who were offered preferential access to the Kruger Park rhinos were South African billionaire Christo Wiese and his game-breeding partner Jacques Hartzenberg, co-owners of a farm called Kalahari Oryx. Taking advantage of the opportunity, Wiese and Hartzenberg bought an unknown number of rhinos on the cheap, at prices of R50,000 (US $4,300) or more below average market-value.

The is despite the fact that prices for rhino hunting at private game reserves have been on the rise since 2014, as hunting quotas were reduced as a result of the increased poaching. Fees range from R825,000 ($70,000) to over R1 million ($85,000) for a trophy-quality bull, depending on the size of the main horn.)

Wiese then made a deal to sell some of the rhinos to the Marula hunting farm, a 29,500 hectare private reserve owned by Russian billionaire Rashid Sardarov near Namibia’s capital of Windhoek. Sardarov is a keen hunter, boasting trophies that include a critically-endangered black rhino.

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