How Far Will Conservationists Go to Save the Last Rhinoceros?

The last female rhinoceros in South Africa's Krugersdorp National Park bled to death last week after poachers sawed off her horn with her calf standing nearby.

Her calf was moved to the nearby Rhino and Lion Park, where he lives with two other orphaned white rhinos. After three weeks, he's still jumpy around humans and refuses to feed from the bottle of formula milk.

Last year, the Krugersdorp reserve saw 129 rhinos killed for their horns; this year, there have already been 136 deaths, including the last female in the park. And it's not just Krugersdorp where poaching is at an all-time high. In the past week, five men were arrested in Kruger Park with bloodied rhino horns, AK-47 assault rifles, bolt-action rifles and an axe. Poachers have become so efficient, and so ruthless, they risk putting themselves out of business.

As Annie Hartnett noted earlier this month, rhino horn is now worth more than gold on the black market. The horn usually ends up in Asian countries, where it's used in traditional Chinese medicine, but some of it stays in Africa, where some traditional healers use it to treat impotence. Rhino horn has been tested every which way and it has absolutely no real medicinal properties.

Back in March, at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) meeting, rhinos were granted more protection with a commitment to focus on improving enforcement, border controls, population monitoring, and awareness campaigns. South African National Parks has set up a National Wildlife Crime Reaction Unit, comprised of local and national crime units and anti-poaching experts.  But they're still having a hard time keeping up with increasingly sophisticated poachers who descend on the parks with helicopters, high-tech night-vision binoculars, bullet-proof vests and an arsenal of weapons.

Ed Hern, owner of the Rhino and Lion Park where the orphan of  Krugersdorp's last female found sanctuary, thinks it's time for extreme measures.  To drive down demand for rhino horns, he says, "We need to try poisoning the horns with something like cyanide so when someone uses it for medicine, they will die." He says he's started testing this technique with a veterinarian. Since the horn is made of tightly packed hair and doesn't contain blood vessels, poison can be injected into it without adversely affecting the rhinoceros.

Not everyone agrees with Hern's proposal. Faan Coetzee of the Endangered Wildlife Trust says, if it worked, "you could be arrested for murder." Coetzee and other colleagues want a more legal crackdown. Hern has consulted his own lawyers and knows he could be in trouble if he goes through with it. He also says he'll shoot any poachers on sight that go after his rhinos and "will shoot a helicopter out of the sky if it is flying low over my farm at night."

He's clearly angry, he's out of patience, but is he right? There's an estimated 18,000 black and white rhinos left on the continent of Africa. When you're talking about the last remaining wild members of a species on earth, that's a small enough number that a park can say they just lost their last female to poachers. Everyone agrees that it's desperate times for rhinos, but how desperate should the measures be to protect them?

Photo credit: Lorraine R