- Big game hunters can return to Africa to shoot the black
rhino after a 20-year worldwide ban on trade in the animals was lifted
yesterday.
-
- Successful conservation efforts by Namibia and South
Africa led the two countries to apply for an annual quota of five black
rhinos each for trophy hunters at the meeting of the 166-country Convention
on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) in Bangkok.
-
- The estimated £30,000 a head the hunters will pay
will go to game conservation, the two countries said. From 1970, when there
were an estimated 65,000 black rhinos in Africa, numbers plummeted to 2,400
in the 1990s, according to the International Fund for Animal Welfare
(Ifaw),
which condemned yesterday's decision.
-
- The organisation believes that the survival of the black
rhino in most of Africa is not secure because of poachers. They sell the
horns to China, where they are ground down for a claimed fever cure, and
to the Middle East, for use as dagger handles.
-
- In Bangkok, Peter Pueschel of Ifaw said: "This is
a catastrophe, and the fact that the EU supported it is terrible. It is
a signal for poachers and the illegal trade to start again. Kenya,
Swaziland
and other countries still trying to save their rhinos from poachers face
another onslaught because of this. There is very little evidence that any
money from trophy hunting goes back into the local community."
-
- Others argue that the income from big-game hunters will
increase protection for the animals as a financial incentive to keep them
alive. South Africa and Namibia said that only old males would be ear
marked
for hunting, with no effect on the species' recovery.
-
- The World Conservation Trust, which represents countries
wanting to reopen trade in protected species, said that there was a serious
imbalance in rhino populations, partly caused by conservation. In a
submission
to Cites, the trust said the best way to eliminate old males was through
trophy hunting, which raised a significant amount of money for
conservation.
-
- In June, the International Union for the Conservation
of Nature and the WWF said southern Africa's black rhino population had
increased by 500 in two years, to 3,600.
-
- Namibia's quota proposal was endorsed by the meeting
because of the country's outstanding conservation efforts, but there were
reservations about South Africa because of its lack of preparedness to
manage big-game hunting.
-
- The treaty states meet every two years to regulate trade
in about 30,000 endangered species of plants and animals.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/conservation
- /story/0,13369,1319801,00.html
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