It is my opinion that government paid far too much attention to the animal rights opposition to WHITE rhino farming and WHITE rhino horn trimming and it put blocks all along the highway towards the development of a rational legal trade in rhino horn.
My advice? Take away all the blockages and assist South Africa’s rhino farmers to create, to develop and to succeed in establishing an international trade in legal rhino horn.
Register ALL the rhino farms as captive-breeding units with CITES, and do something positive for the rhino farmers, for a change! If Government does not do this, it will have failed this country’s wildlife industry in the most terrible of ways. And it may even see the extinction of all our WHITE rhinos because, if rhino farming does not pay, it will not endure. And I, for one, will lay the cause of that crime – the extinction of our rhinos – at the feet of those who created an inept government policy.
In terms of BLACK rhinos, there is a conflict of management interests between the BLACK rhinos in our game reserves, and a totally inept government management policy on how to handle the excessive numbers of elephants in our game reserves.
The too-many-elephants are destroying their own habitats, and in the process they are also destroying the essential BLACK rhino habitats in our game reserves, and nobody within the body of our scientific authorities understand just what is happening.
I have written to SANParks about this; and I have written to the Natal wildlife authorities about this – and received a zero response.
This subject is my greatest passion and I know what I am talking about. And I no longer know who to appeal to with regards to this very important issue.
If nothing happens to rectify what is going on I predict here and now that we will lose all our black rhinos in Kruger National Park, and in the Umfolosi-Hluhluwe complex in Kwa-Zulu Natal, due to nothing more than elephant management ineptitude.
