- GLAND, Switzerland (AP) --
Gangs of poachers in Congo have been slaughtering the world's minuscule
population of northern white rhinos, reducing the population by about one-half
in just more than a year, a key conservation organization said Friday.
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- Numbers of the white rhino in the Garamba National Park
in war-torn northeastern Congo, the species' only wild population, dropped
to between 17 and 22 in an aerial survey conducted in July, the World Conservation
Union said. That means 14 to 19 rhinos have been lost in only 14 months,
it said.
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- "This is the only viable population left,"
the group said in a statement. "The breeding success of the few animals
found in captivity is very poor."
-
- Northern white rhinoceroses formerly were widespread,
with an estimated 2,250 living in five African states in 1960, but poachers
killing the animal for their horns reduced the wild population to 15 by
1984, all of them in the park, the statement said.
-
- Conservation efforts helped the animal to recover, and
an April, 2003, survey found about 30, the organization said.
-
- Increasing numbers of heavily armed poaching gangs from
the area and neighbouring Sudan are believed responsible for the recent
slaughter.
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- "It is devastating and deeply frustrating to see
fresh rhino and elephant carcasses," said Kes Hillman Smith of the
Garamba National Park Project.
-
- The World Conservation Union said the park's guards are
struggling to stop the poachers.
-
- "Several guards have lost their lives in anti-poaching
operations," it said.
-
- The park's losses contrast with the increasing populations
of other species of African rhinos.
-
- "Apart from a temporary recovery in the early 1970s,
the northern white rhino has never managed to emulate the recovery of its
southern relative," the organization said. "The southern white
rhino has increased from approximately 50 individuals in 1895, to over
11,000 today."
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- In June, the conservation union and the World Wide Fund
for Nature said Africa's endangered black rhinoceros population has increased
by 500 in the past two years to 3,600 in southern Africa.
-
- Poachers seek the rhinoceros horns because it is used
as a fever-reducing ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine in East
Asia and for making dagger handles in the Middle East.
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