BY JOHN NASH

The cerebral world of academia has given gas-and-air birth to another classical study for the world’s edification and delight, published a couple of months ago in People and Nature and in Popular Science. 

Four eminent researchers have postulated that rhino horns are becoming smaller and conclude that selective human hunting might be to blame, saying, “we found evidence of declining horn size perhaps related to selective pressure from hunting….both modern poaching and traditional hunting are selective in the individuals killed”. I hate to pee on their intellectual fireworks, but that statement is the sort of twaddle that comes from the kind of people who have never been bitten on the scrote by a tsetse fly, trodden on a devil thorn or dug a tick out of their armpit –  it simply isn’t true – neither poacher or traditional hunter is selective when it comes to rhinos.

You see, poachers will kill any rhino for the tiniest nub of valuable horn and will even kill dehorned rhinos to save wasting time tracking them again when there are game rangers around. Provided you are not actually a criminal game ranger yourself, any time spent poaching is dangerous – game rangers shoot to kill if necessary – and the longer time spent poaching, the more likely you will die from high speed lead poisoning. 

Regulated trophy hunters, on the other hand, are not selective either – they are so very, very lucky to get an opportunity to hunt a legal rhino at all because so few come up for hunting that hunters are happy with a representative specimen for their trophy collection. Neither group is particularly picky. It follows that despite the attractiveness of the “selective” proposition to urban ears, hunters are not selective, so they are clearly not to blame if horn sizes are diminishing. I therefore imagine this latest horn “research” is little more than a bandwagon ride on an earlier, equally dodgy bit of recent “research” about smaller elephant tusks. 

Apparently, the four happy hornographers in this case studied a huge heap of historical photos and etchings in the repository of images maintained by the Netherlands-based Rhino Research Centre to reach their conclusion. Clearly, “Come up and look at my horn etchings” is a fruitful academic enterprise, and I am sure that their contribution will be enthusiastically accepted, particularly when this kind of academic ambrosia is also the colour of the paint on that mythic bandwagon called trophy hunting. It is a rather sad reality that researchers need to attract necessary funds to survive, ipso facto only research proposals containing the popular words “extinction”, “climate”, “global warming” or “trophy hunting” get to feed from the funding’s life-giving trough these days. 

If you’re looking for research funding as a way to live a life of alcohol and sex in the sun without working too hard, rather than searching for boring scientific truth, I suggest you entitle your research something like:

“In addition to immoral cruelty, the bullets of psychopathic trophy hunters give off toxic carbon monoxide, ammonia, cyanide and lead aerosols leading to the global warming catastrophe, climate collapse and the extinction of all life on earth.” 

That should do nicely and the BINGOs (big international NGOs) will throw money at your valuable contribution to human knowledge since, thus suitably entitled, your research will obviously fall within the ambit of their rather fluid charitable purposes and so they can claim that all of your undeserved research dosh proves they are fulfilling their charitable purposes and funding the fight against a whole plethora of modern eco-bogeymen.

Cleverly, your much desired early retirement filled with indulgence, funded by your “research”, will be paid for by little old ladies who have been suckered to donate their life savings or bequeath you their estate in order to save the last remaining…… (please enter your charismatic animal of choice here, preferably one that has cute photogenic babies). 

Play your cards right (left, actually) and whole posses of fishy MPs will promptly line up to proclaim their piety to the electorate by supporting you and they will lie using your valuable research in debates in the House, while the BBC will pay you handsomely to appear as an eco-expert providing you use their approved list of woke words. With luck, you’ll then be able to wangle paid field trips to Africa and a free seat at every COP. In this way, you will join the elite magic circle of  modern alchemists who, unlike their predecessors of old (who tried in vain to turn lead into gold) have learned today how to turn worthless eco-fairydust, factless horn blowing and downright deception into real gold via “popular” research, votes and social currency. But I digress.

Where were we? Rhino horn. It’s getting shorter. It is common knowledge that a rhino’s horn is basically a pointy lump of hairy fingernail and it is horn, not antler. Rhino horns, like antelope horns (and the lies of animal rights organisations) grow continuously throughout life. Deer, on the other hand, have antlers that are regularly jettisoned and re-grown, like politicians’ ethics. Cheap jokes aside, it brings two further concerns about this suspect “decreasing rhino horn” research.

The first is that a rhino can live up to fifty years or so – and its horn gets longer and longer as it gets older, so could shorter horns simply mean that rhinos being killed these days are simply not as old as those in the old days, when there were zillions of the huge beasts, including many surviving until much later in life?  If so, it would suggest that killing too many, rather than trophy selecting long-horned individuals, might be the cause of the deficiency. 

My second concern is the hornographers’ use of the term “hunting”. Of course, over time, huge numbers of rhinos have been killed by humans, but researchers really should be more precise in using the term “hunting” and distinguish between poaching, land clearing and pest control before they even get to the differences between uncontrolled legacy hunting, culling and modern regulated trophy hunting.

It is actually suspected that the bulk of avoidable rhino losses were poached on an industrial scale by corrupt government ministers and elites in East Africa after independence – they organised the slaughter and were in a position to ship whole containers filled with horns to the Far East regardless of bans. More recently, rhino poaching still involves impoverished villagers and now includes corrupt game guards supplying the same foreign demand. 

150 years ago, when trophy hunters shot high numbers of rhinos, there were a million rhinos or more, many with those long horns, so “white hunters” were not responsible for extinctions because there were plenty of rhinos. Loss of habitat and human settlement were the biggest problems continent-wide (rhinos were seen as dangerous pests). The Southern African white rhino (subject of unending lies and claims of imminent extinction by eco-chuggers today) was once down to less than 100 but is now back up to about 12,000. These days, modern regulated trophy hunting is very strictly and carefully controlled according to scientific principles via permits and licences in order to have a beneficial effect on the health and fertility of rhino populations, so there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that trophy hunting, past or present, caused population extinctions. The culprits were farm clearing and commercial poaching.

But, Dear Reader, because myopic or zealous researchers don’t make this clear, and despite their use of the disclaimer “perhaps”, the very idea that humans have caused rhino horns to become smaller at gene level has been leapt on, like a tramp on a sandwich, by the anti-hunting ARVI (animal rightists/vegans/the insane) and the media that feeds them their hysterical fake news. They don’t bother separating legal, regulated hunting from habitat loss or poaching and so, after years of disinformation, the public doesn’t separate them either. They are left with the Victorian fiction of posh, pith-helmeted colonials blasting rhinos to oblivion. It is a total fiction but one that our MPs use to solicit votes, celebs use to wallpaper over their greedy and frivolous, expensive lives and eco-chuggers use to solicit cash donations from a duped public.

But, counterintuitive as it seems, modern trophy hunting actually helps rhinos. The problem today is that there is a world ban on the trade in rhino horn but a steady demand for it in the Far East. This means that legal owners of rhinos can’t trim the horns on their rhinos and sell the trimmings to fill the demand. In turn, this gives criminals a monopoly and restricts supply, sending the price sky high. The high price encourages further poaching, so legal owners of rhinos have to pay guards to watch their rhinos 24/7.

However, because legal trade in horn is prohibited, legal owners have no way to raise money by trimming and selling horn to pay guards, so they have to sell one or two rhinos to trophy hunters in order to pay for guarding the rest (up to $100,000 for a white rhino). It’s a spiral of waste and the pointless ban on the rhino horn trade doesn’t save any rhinos – it actually gets rhinos killed – killed by poachers who kill them for horns and by trophy hunters whose trophy fees actually pay for guarding the rest. 

It is so bad that the price of live rhinos is falling at auction – few landowners want to keep rhinos because they are expensive white elephants and attract armed criminals. Even the world’s biggest and much criticised rhino farmer, with 2000 rhinos, is giving up.

And you thought the ban would save rhinos?

If the ban was lifted, the 15,000 rhino horns in government stores and 19,000 rhino horns in private stockpiles (mainly from natural mortality and confiscations) in South Africa alone, plus the regular horn trimming of the national herd, could be released steadily onto the (DNA regulated) market, estimated to be around 1500 horns per year. This would bring the price of horn down (unless, of course, you are an “eco-economist” and invert real-life economics in order to argue out of your low-carbon, protectionist fundament). 

More importantly, if trade was made legal, thousands of land owners would warmly welcome rhinos onto their properties once again, adding perhaps 20,000 or more to the national population. Everyone loves rhinos, especially modern land owners in Africa. It is not trophy hunting that is the rhino’s problem – it’s the absurd political ban on selling horn that makes it more valuable than gold. The ban gets rhinos killed rather than conserved and unsurprisingly the ban hasn’t prevented a number of disgraceful local population extinctions.

The pending and totally dishonest Private Members Bill to ban the importation of hunting trophies (just to make MPs and slebs look pious) is equally stupid and counter productive and is soon up for its third reading to become very, very bad UK law. Driven by the deceitful hate-monger Eduardo Gonçalves, it will get millions of wild animals killed in Southern Africa if he succeeds, so when he blows his horn, it is best ignored if you want to help wildlife.

John Nash grew up in West Cornwall and was a £10 pom to Johannesburg in the early 1960’s. He started well in construction project management, mainly high-rise buildings but it wasn’t really Africa, so he went bush, prospecting and trading around the murkier bits of the bottom half of the continent. Now retired back in Cornwall among all the other evil old pirates. His interests are still sustainable resources, wildlife management and the utilitarian needs of rural Africa.