Hello JV,
Please will you post the following letter
on your website. Thanks again for your support, it is
encouraging that someone such as yourself who has the
practical understanding of the situation, can see through
the current DEAD END (literally for the rhinos) approach
being followed by CITES, our government and thousands of
well meaning “Save the Rhino” charities and organisations.
As a PASSIONATE Rhino breeder I thought I
would give an explanation below of some of the practical
challenges that I face in breeding Rhinos so that your
readers may gain a better understanding.
I make NO excuses IT IS MY PASSION AND
LIFE'S WORK TO SAVE THE RHINO FROM EXTINCTION.
My goal is to be breeding within five
years 200 rhinos per year (I already breed well over 100
per year). My birth records over the past 20 years of rhino
breeding tells me that these will be split approximately in
a ratio of 110 males and 90 females. For the 90 females
who obviously have a purpose breeding future Rhino
generations I will need nine breeding bulls for Stud
purposes. Therefore I will have 101 males left EVERY YEAR
“without meaningful employment” if I can coin a phrase!!
The question is what can I do with these
rhino? For two reasons I have no appetite for selling these
to be slaughtered by the “Pseudo hunting” market even if you
could get permits to do so. (This remains one of the few
legal options to generate revenue as a rhino breeder)
1. I could never stand to see them
killed having known them personally and spent literally day
and night planning, worrying, protecting and funding them
from the time of their birth.
2. The “Pseudo market” would slaughter
them for 8 or 10 kilos of horn whereas I (or my successors)
will get at least 60 kg of horn from them during their
natural life of approximately 40 years. WHAT A WASTE OF A
RENEWABLE NATURAL RESOURCE.
So now I must DO EVERYTHING POSSIBLE to
keep them alive!! I have the following difficulties. While
the 90 females are being fed and growing until the day they
can breed more rhinos please follow my explanation below
on the fate of the 101 males.
I need to buy a new farm every year,
fence it and prepare it for 101 rhinos. This will cost me
currently about R12 million and then to manage, protect and
feed them another R2 million per year. So I need R14
million increasing by R14 million EVERY SINGLE YEAR WITHOUT
EVER GETTING ONE SINGLE RAND AS A RETURN ON THIS INVESTMENT
AND WITHOUT GIVING MY RHINOS A CHANCE TO CONTRIBUTE TO THE
SURVIVAL OF THEIR SPECIES. Add to this inflation and you
will see the impossibility of this model being any use at
all to our rhino survival without a change to be able to use
a renewable natural resource. The protection costs are
increasing exponentially monthly as highlighted by you and
amongst many, many other costs, we will soon need
helicopters and armed crews on my farms on 24 hour standby!
Coupled to this we are witnessing our
Government losing the war in our National Parks and yet
CITES and the government refuses to let us use a renewable
natural resource to rescue our rhinos. Official figures have
shown Rhino poaching growing exponentially since 2008 yet
even these figures may be hiding the true extent of the
problem. To the best of my knowledge no complete count (as
used to be done) of the number of Rhinos in the Kruger
National Park has been done for several years and as
suggested in a recent article in Africa Geographic magazine
there is a possibility that numbers are much much lower than
the officially estimated numbers (9-10 thousand). One
suggestion was given that (horrifyingly) these numbers could
be as low as 3000!!!! My own experience is that poaching is
not always easy to detect even though I have much smaller
farms and I do not have on my farms Lion and Hyena as in the
KNP to quickly “disguise” the crime. If these figures are
even remotely true then we need to realise that Albert
Einstein’s quote below on Insanity is eerily prescient:-
“Insanity: doing the
same thing over and over again and expecting different
results.”
If ONLY we could persuade governments &
CITES to have the COURAGE to STOP DOING THE SAME THING OVER
AND OVER AGAIN UNTIL THERE ARE NO MORE RHINO LEFT. We could
get with some COURAGE and OUT THE BOX THINKING from these
ever increasing males (which live for 40 years) the
financial AMMUNITION (coupled with our stockpiles) to turn
the tide in our Rhino war.
Having explained the difficulties of
breeding rhinos to your readers they will understand that I
stand virtually no chance of persuading other farmers to
become rhino breeders. Private Enterprise could do it,
rhinos have the weapon to do it but the powers that be
continue to refuse the use of a renewable resource to rescue
our rhino from extinction.
If the world does not allow private
enterprise to breed rhino we will lose the rhino war. The
results of the present course are plain to see in the
results of the last ten years.
Thank you for allowing me to air my
views.
John Hume.
PASSIONATE Rhino breeder. South Africa
PS: I agree that we should do what we
can to reduce the demand in the East but there are 3 billion
potential users of rhino horn, so if you spend 3 billion USD
per annum you will be spending 1 USD per person. Education
on this could realistically only achieve a long term result
WE DO NOT HAVE TIME AS THE RHINOS WILL BE EXTINCT. So don’t
hold your breath for a quick huge success.
PPS: New Zealand produces a huge amount
of Deer velvet (horns) per year and it all goes to the
medicine market in the East and yet they do not have any
poaching!!!! Why should they have as the horn all goes to
the East anyway!!! If the current syndicates buying from
the poachers knew that all of our horn was going to be
offered to them, they will be more likely to listen when we
ask them to stop dealing with the poachers and rather buy
from our auctions as the poachers are unnecessarily killing
the rhinos that are going to be producing horns for the
East.
PPPS: A critically endangered animal the
Vicunas WERE rescued from the brink of extinction by
sustainable utilisation & SELF-SERVING STEWARDSHIP , we
could do the same for our rhinos.
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2074156,00.html
Hello
A series of auctions (perhaps one
a year for the next five years) of rhino horn, using
the current stockpiles of horn makes perfect sense
to us for the following reasons:
1. We are currently losing almost
2 rhinos a day (in the past week, this figure has
shot up to 4 rhino a day) while SA and other range
states have many tons of horn in stockpiles. Every
syndicate member that is arrested with rhino horn
and every confiscated horn that gets added to these
stockpiles spells death to yet another rhino. For
every horn we are able to sell, we may just be
saving the life of a rhino and this point must be
emphasized to the authorities and the public.
2. One of the massive hurdles in
the trade/no trade debate is the lack of accurate
market figures. Many people who are opposed to trade
claim that we will never be able to satisfy the
demand for horn but this is something that we can
never estimate until we have accurate and realistic
market figures. These auctions, assuming they are
carefully planned and managed with clear objectives
and monitoring techniques in place, will give us the
economic facts we need in terms of market
structure.
3. These auctions will generate a
desperately needed income injection for rhino
management and protection, especially for our
national parks, which are currently hardest hit by
poachers.
4. If, after 5 years, poaching
figures have not come down and the legal sales of
horn have not eased the immense pressure that is
currently on our rhino populations, we can simply
stop the auctions and start focusing on a new
strategy to save our rhinos. We, as South Africa,
would have lost nothing at all, as the horns in
stockpiles are currently worthless when in fact,
they should be the currency for invaluable
information-gathering and accurate data and
research.
We look forward to your comments
and encourage you to send our correspondence on to
others.
With regards,
Tanya Jacobsen
