China buys up African rhinos ‘to farm for horn’

Jonathan Leake, The Times Online 7 Mar 10;

RHINOS, among the world’s most endangered and iconic animals, are being farmed on Chinese wildlife reserves in order to harvest their horns, a report by international conservation monitors has suggested.

The monitors have found that China has imported 141 live white rhino from South Africa since 2000, far more than is needed for tourism purposes.

They have also gathered evidence that the aim of the purchases is to set up rhino farms.

“The suspicion is that these rhinos are being aggregated into herds and farmed for their horns, which are valued for medicinal purposes,” said Tom Milliken of Traffic, the wildlife trade monitoring network.

The revelation about China’s surge in rhino purchases is part of an official report to be delivered to Cites (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species). A meeting has been organised in Qatar from next weekend to discuss the burgeoning trade in threatened animals and plants.

The report says: “Since 2000 Chinese data suggest 141 rhinos were obtained from South Africa. Reports of horn harvesting of captive rhinos in China have surfaced but need further verification. Clarification on the purpose of keeping large aggregations of captive rhino in China would be welcomed.”

The discovery has alarmed British and European Union officials, who plan to ask the Chinese to explain if they are allowing rhino farming.

Defra, the environment ministry, said: “There are allegations around horn harvesting of captive rhinos in China and these need to be investigated.”

Rhinos have suffered a catastrophic decline in numbers over the past 50 years. There are five rhino species, of which three live in Asia.

One of these, the Javan rhino, is close to extinction, with just 130 creatures estimated to be left, while the closely related Sumatran rhino numbers only about 300. Even the great one-horned rhino, found mainly in India, has only about 2,800 animals.

However, it is the fate of the more numerous African rhinos that is causing the most concern because of a surge in poaching, as well as exports.

Of the two African species, black rhinos number only about 4,200 while there are an estimated 17,500 white rhinos left. These days most are kept in reserves and wildlife parks, unlike a century ago when hundreds of thousands of animals roamed Africa.

The recent decline is, according to Traffic, almost all because of surging demand for rhino horn in Asian traditional medicine. Despite being made mainly of keratin, the same protein found in fingernails and hair, the ground-up horn is reputed to calm fevers such as malaria. There is also a renewed threat to rhinos from claims, said to be emanating from Vietnam, that the horn can cure cancer.

Rhino horn is now so valuable that Vietnamese embassy officials have been caught trying to smuggle horns back home. Similarly, South Africa has seen a surge in applications from Vietnamese hunters for licences to shoot captive-bred animals in private wildlife reserves.

Mark Jones, programme director for Care for the Wild International, a conservation charity involved with the Cites agreement, said all rhino species were fully protected under the treaty — so the aim of the Qatar conference should be to improve enforcement.

He added: “We would like to know what China is doing with all the live rhinos it is importing from South Africa but the increased reports of rhino poaching, particularly in South Africa and Zimbabwe, are very worrying too.”

Rhinos are just one of several species whose chances of survival could be determined by the talks. Others include African elephants, polar bears, bluefin tuna and hammerhead sharks.

One of the thorniest issues under discussion is the growing number of tiger farms in China, where about 6,000 of the big cats are held in captivity — compared with the 50 or so which are left in the wild.