Post by ranibilkis88888 on Feb 18, 2024 3:32:33 GMT
Captive breeding project that counts one in eight southern white rhinos in the world ended in a whimper, with a total of zero bids. According to a press release on the platinum rhino project website, it has received offline offers that are being considered, but a new owner has not yet been announced. At least one interested party is known to be primarily interested in the potential profits should the rhino horn trade be legalized. The auction was the culmination of platinum rhino founder john hume's growing financial problems after he announced five years ago that he was running out of cash to fund the operation. In the intervening years, hume was WhatsApp Number List unsuccessful in his search for an investor to help him share the burden of the project's $9,800 daily running costs. “I'm so disappointed that more billionaires haven't come to the table,” he said in an interview before the auction. Intact ecosystems, where rhino populations can exist as naturally as possible, are generally considered the primary goal of conservationists. As such, large parks and protected areas have long been the cornerstone of rhino conservation. This approach was successful for many years, but a poaching epidemic that began around 2008, combined with limited budgets for many large protected areas, has dramatically changed the landscape of rhino conservation.
South africa's kruger national park has lost 75% of its southern white rhinos since 2011: more than 8,000 rhinos. Smaller protected areas and private operations that are easier to protect are now having the most success in weathering the poaching storm. If the number of protected rhinos is the only metric of interest, then hume is undoubtedly one of the most successful, with approximately 13% of all the world's remaining southern white rhinos in his private herd. That equates to 1,999 rhinos, a number hume achieved by adopting the approaches of south africa's $1.5 billion-a-year wildlife farming industry in which pedigree records, offspring productivity and performance are the lingua franca. . While you won't find it in any of the tourism brochures, the animal husbandry industry has always been inextricably linked to conservation in south africa. A key component of the model is a market in which to sell the final product: for south africa's wildlife farming industry, more than half of its income comes from trophy hunting . In hume's case, the market he bet on was the legalization of the rhino horn trade, a debate that has been repeated ad nauseum by conservationists and economists and is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon. If international trade were legalized, hume could make a significant sum of money from his stock of antlers collected during regular dehorning operations on his property, a stock not included in the sale. But in the absence of legal trade, hume's approach is financially unsustainable.
The lack of bidders to take over one of the world's largest rhino populations highlights a major issue that rhino range states now face: with many wild populations decimated and the sums not adding up for private owners, where does rhino conservation go from here? Who can own a rhino? The wildlife farming industry in south africa is based on the principle that private landowners can own wildlife , including rhinos. This principle was enshrined in south african law in the game theft act of 1991, a year before hume began breeding rhinos. The southern white rhino came dangerously close to extinction in the late 19th century, after colonial hunters decimated populations. The subspecies was saved thanks to the creation of the hluhluwe-imfolozi park in kwazulu-natal province and the work of ezemvelo, the government body responsible for managing kwazulu-natal conservation areas. In the 1960s, the natal parks board, as it was then known, had enough rhinos to begin donating and selling them to other conservation areas, including kruger in 1963. In 1986, it also began selling to private operations. “what was really critical in south africa is that, along with the ability of private owners to own rhinos, what also happened is that the government allowed them to do very limited trophy hunting,” said hayley clements, a researcher at the university from stellenbosch. “because the price people were willing to pay to hunt a rhino was really high, there were a lot of incentives for landowners to grow the rhino population.” the high values paid by trophy hunters kept live prices high, meaning that even for properties that did not offer trophy hunting, rhinos could make money.