The Hindu : International : The big game hunters win

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Wednesday, Oct 06, 2004

International

International

The big game hunters win

By Paul Brown— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

BANGKOK, OCT. 5. 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) here.

The estimated £30,000 (about Rs. 24. 6 lakhs) a head that the hunters will pay will go to game conservation, the two countries claimed. 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. It believes 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 West Asia, for use as dagger handles.

Peter Pueschel of the IFAW said here: ``This is a catastrophe, and the fact that the European Union 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 earmarked 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 (IUCN) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (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 country's lack of preparedness to manage big-game hunting.

The treaty nations meet every two years to regulate trade in about 30,000 endangered species of plants and animals.

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