Posted on 10/28/2010 3:52:44 PM PDT by nickcarraway
THE roaring chainsaw sends fingernail-like shards flying into the baking Zimbabwean bush as it slices through the slumped black rhino's foot-long horn.
The critically endangered female loses her spikes in just seconds, after being darted from a helicopter.
A few minutes later, she leaps up and escapes -- disfigured but alive -- in a dramatic attempt to deter the poachers who have unleashed a bloodbath on southern Africa's rhinos. "De-horning reduces the reward for the poacher," said Raoul du Toit of the Lowveld Rhino Trust which operates in Zimbabwe's arid southeast.
"Poaching is a balance between reward and risk. It may tip the economic equation in the situation to one where it's not worth the poacher operating."
Rhino poaching reached an all-time high in Africa last year, according to the International Rhino Foundation. In Zimbabwe, where just 700 rhinos remain, anti-poaching units face military-like armed gangs who ruthlessly shoot the animals to hack off the distinctive horns for the Asian traditional medicine market.
"These poachers in this part of the world here will shoot on sight. They operate in very aggressive units," Du Toit told AFP.
"They adopt patrol formations when they are after rhinos to detect any anti-poaching units that are deployed against them and they will open fire without hesitation.
"So there've been many gunfights -- a number of poachers killed, not so many on law enforcement side but that's mainly through luck."
Asian demand for rhino horn, believed to treat anything from headaches to sexual woes, has lured highly organised criminal syndicates.
Zimbabwe's black rhino were poached to a low of 300 in 1995 but recovered and levelled off to nearly double this before plummeting again to reach around 400 last year, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
"It was at this time, 2006-2007, when we actually saw the steep escalation in poaching which is related to syndicate kind of poaching orchestrated out of South Africa," said WWF's African rhino manager Joseph Okari.
"It is what makes a big difference between the poaching of today... and the poaching of the '80s and the early '90s," he said.
"That was not highly organised and well co-ordinated like what we are seeing today."
South Africa and Zimbabwe are rhino poaching hotspots, accounting for nearly all of the 470 rhinos killed in Africa between 2006 and 2009. Half of those killed were in Zimbabwe.
THE roaring chainsaw sends fingernail-like shards flying into the baking Zimbabwean bush as it slices through the slumped black rhino's foot-long horn.
If they are anything like the horns of buffalo, they are like dense fingernails.
Why don’t they sell the horns gathered this way and turn the rhinos into a cash crop.
For that matter, why can’t we hunt RINOs from helicopters?
African poachers kill them and take their horns because of Chinese “traditional medicine” and a bunch of limp d*ck Chinese wankers who don't have enough brains to buy something that will actually work - like Viagra.
“You take horn of Rhino, you have sex like Rhino!” the Chinese mystic snake oil salesman tells the limp d*ck Chinese idiot!
Yeah, sex like a Rhino, a couple times a year?
Absolute idiocy.
“For that matter, why can’t we hunt RINOs from helicopters?”
RINO’s are worthless, the cost of helicopter hunts would be prohibitive, and where would one get sufficient arm length rubber gloves necessary to dress and clean those things?
Does this mean rhinos get mani pedis?
I propose they offer a bounty on poachers- $500 per head brought in, $250 for a live one. Might also be a good idea to contract out to first world militaries- plenty of opportunities for live-round target practice.
You been dreamin’ too much?
“For that matter, why can’t we hunt RINOs from helicopters?”
Guided hunts? Where do I sign up?
Dress & clean? Buzzards gotta eat too.
“Eat Tiger balls, you have sex drive like Tiger!” so goes the ‘sympathetic magic’ and simplistic thinking of Chinese Traditional “medicine”.
A Tiger has sex once a year. We are already about the second most sex engaged animal on the planet, for the “magic” to actually make any sense the Tiger should be eating OUR body parts to increase the Tiger's sex drive.
“Eat balls of human, have sex drive like human!” one Tiger would tell another. If ‘sympathetic magic’ actually worked other than as a placebo.
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