Last Chance to See

in traditional medicine in the Far East,but a major part of the trade in rhino horn is caused by something much more absurd, and it’s this: fashion. Dagger handles made of rhinoceros horn are an extremely fashionable item of male jewelry in Yemen. That’s it: costume jewelry.
    Let’s see the effect of this fashion.
    Northern white rhinos were unknown to the Western world until their discovery in 1903. At the time, there were enormous numbers of them in five different countries: Chad, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Uganda, and Zaïre. But their discovery spelt disaster, because unfortunately for the northern white rhino, it has two horns—which makes it doubly attractive to poachers. The front one, the longest, averages two feet in length; the world record-holder had an incredible horn six feet long and, sadly, was worth some five thousand dollars.
    By 1980, all but a thousand northern white rhinos had been killed by poachers. There were still no serious efforts to protect them and, five years later, the population reached an all-time low of just thirteen animals, all living in Garamba National Park. The animal was on the verge of extinction.
    Until 1984, Garamba’s five thousand square kilometres were under the protection of a small number of staff. These staff were untrained, often unpaid, had no vehicles and no equipment. If a poacher wanted to kill a rhino, all he had to do was turn up. Even local Zaïrois occasionally killed the rhinos, to fashion small pieces of horn into rings which they believed would protect them against poison and harmful people. But most of the horn was taken by heavily armed Sudanese poachers. It was taken back to Sudan and, from there, entered the illegal international marketplace.
    The situation in Garamba has improved dramatically since then, with the rehabilitation project that began in 1984. There is now a total of 246 trained staff, with eleven vehicles, a light aircraft, permanent guard posts throughout the park, and mobile patrols all in radio contact with one another.Two rhinos poached in May 1984, immediately after the rehabilitation work began, were the last to be killed in the park. The poacher was caught and imprisoned, but later allowed to escape. Attitudes have changed so much now that it is unlikely he would be allowed to escape again. Other species are still poached, but intensive protection over the past five years has at last begun to have an effect. In fact, there have been a number of rhino births and the population now stands at a slightly better twenty-two.
    Twenty-two.
    An astounding feature of the situation is this: the eventual value of a rhino horn, by the time it has been shipped out of Africa and fashioned into a piece of tasteless costume jewelry for some rich young Yemeni to strut around and pull girls with, is thousands of dollars. But the poacher himself, the man who goes into the park and risks his life to shoot the actual rhino that all of this time, effort, and money are going into protecting, will get about ten or twelve or fifteen dollars for the horn. So the difference between life or death for one of the rarest and most magnificent animals in the world is actually about twelve dollars.
    It’s easy to ask—in fact, I asked this—why not simply pay the poachers more
not
to kill the animals? The answer, of course, is very simple. If one person offers a poacher, say, twenty-five dollars not to shoot an animal, and then someone else offers him twelve dollars to shoot it, the poacher is liable to see that he can now earn thirty-seven dollars from the same animal. While the horns continue to command the amount of money they do, there is always going to be an incentive for someone to go and earn that money. So the question really is this: How do you persuade a young Yemeni that a rhino horn dagger is not a symbol of your manhood but a signal of the fact that you need such a symbol?
    Recently, there have been two separate, though unconfirmed, sightings of northern white rhinos in Southern NationalPark, Sudan. But the current political situation there means that very little can be done about them and, effectively, the only animals with any chance of survival have been restricted to Garamba since the mid-Eighties. They are still in a precarious position, but there is one ray of hope: experience with the southern white rhino.
    Northern white rhinos and southern white rhinos belong to the same species, but their populations have been separated for