Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade

by Rademeyer, Julian

  ‘I make very good money out of the hunts. When the Vietnamese came in, all of a sudden they started paying R50 000, R60 000 and R70 000 a kilogram. Rhino prices shot through the roof. American hunters won’t pay that. A guy who sells a rhino hunt to an American is fucked up, because he’s not going to make any money. What does it matter who shoots a rhino, an American or a Vietnamese? You go with whoever can pay the most money. That’s the way it works. It’s not my problem what they do with the horn over there.’

  It’s called ‘pseudo-hunting’. It isn’t hunting, it’s shooting. And the ‘hunters’ are little more than pawns recruited by criminal syndicates to acquire horn for the medicinal black markets of Southeast Asia and China. Everyone knows it, from the outfitters and professional hunters who arrange the hunts to the permitting officials and bureaucrats who are meant to enforce the regulations.

  In July 2009, the Professional Hunters’ Association of South Africa (PHASA) took the unprecedented step of advising members ‘not to book and conduct hunts with nationals from Vietnam or other Far Eastern countries’ until the government had ‘removed this abuse from our legal system’.

  In a statement, PHASA’s then president, Peter Butland, said that ‘expert evidence from enforcement and trade monitoring agencies [has] indicated a direct link between the export of rhino horn from recent legal rhino hunting by Vietnamese, from rhino poaching on private and state land, from cross-border smuggling, from the theft of rhino horn … and Far Eastern syndicates’.

  It was a warning that went largely unheeded.

  The first Vietnamese ‘sports hunter’ to be issued a permit to shoot a rhino in South Africa arrived in the country in 2003. Others soon followed. Records show that nine rhino ‘trophies’ and two rhino ‘horns’ were exported from South Africa to Vietnam that year. This implies – if you take into account that a trophy comprises both front and back horns – that at least ten white rhinos were shot and twenty horns obtained in pseudo-hunts.

  The following year, three trophies were taken and then, according to the CITES trade database, the market escalated dramatically. Twelve trophies – twenty-four horns – left South African shores in 2005, bound for Vietnam. In 2006, at least ninety-eight horns were shipped. By 2007, that number had jumped to 146 horns. In 2008, it dipped to ninety-eight horns, then rose again sharply to 136 horns in 2009 and 131 in 2010.

  In total, over a seven-year period, at least 329 rhinos were ‘hunted’ by Vietnamese nationals, netting about 659 horns. Assuming that the average rhino horn weighed between three kilograms and five kilograms, this means that between two and three tons of horn were ‘legally’ exported to Vietnam over that period. In black-market terms, that’s worth anywhere been $200 million and $300 million. A bargain for the syndicates, considering that the hunts set them back only about $20 million in trophy fees.

  The figures for the number of rhino hunts are problematic and could potentially be higher. A report issued by the international wildlife-trade-monitoring network TRAFFIC in August 2012, suggests that as many as 400 rhino were shot in pseudo-hunts. The South African Department of Environmental Affairs’ records on rhino hunting permits and trophy exports are notoriously chaotic. In 2010, for instance, CITES data shows that South Africa reported exporting twenty ‘trophies’ and ninety-one ‘horns’ to Vietnam. The previous year it reportedly exported thirty-seven ‘trophies’ and sixty-two ‘horns’. But both CITES and South Africa’s Threatened or Protected Species (TOPS) regulations prohibit the trade of individual rhino horns and allow only for sports-hunted trophies to be legally exported.

  The department readily admits that there are severe inconsistencies. These, they say, are due to a variety of factors but, most significantly, the complexity of the reporting requirements – which many provincial officials fail to grasp – and the lack of a centralised computer system linking all nine provinces and their data to the national department.

  ‘The big problem,’ says Sonja Meintjes, the department’s deputy director for biodiversity compliance, ‘is that we do not have an integrated electronic permitting system … To find out how many permits have been issued, we have to write to each of the nine provincial permitting offices to ask for the data. After a week, we might get four or five provinces responding to us. It is a nightmare. We see the strangest things in provincial reports: species that are not species; or numbers that are incorrect. Three thousand when it should be three hundred, or even thirty. You get things listed like lion horns. Have you ever seen a lion horn? Or even things like ivory from a lion. That is why it is so dangerous to work with that information.’

  TRAFFIC says South Africa’s initial response to the crisis was ‘flat-footed and slow’. In November 2009 a TRAFFIC investigation red-flagged massive discrepancies between South Africa’s recorded exports and Vietnam’s recorded imports of rhino horn trophies. According to TRAFFIC’s report: ‘Vietnamese nationals reportedly conducted 203 white rhino hunts in South Africa in 2005–2007, which would have yielded 406 rhino horns. South African exports, however, only account for 268 horns to Vietnam during this same period, suggesting that one-third of these hunts took place without the subsequent acquisition of CITES documents. In effect, the trophies from sixty-nine hunts could not be accounted for.’

  Official import figures for Vietnam for that period show that only thirty-eight rhino horns were declared at the time of their importation into the country. This means that a staggering 87 per cent of trophies simply vanished after leaving South Africa. Similar discrepancies exist for 2010, when roughly 130 horns were exported to Vietnam. Fewer than thirty imports were declared.

  TRAFFIC’s investigations also indicated that ‘unsurrendered permits were allegedly reused (until their eventual expiration) to accompany additional shipments of rhino horns acquired through illegal means’.

  According to the report:

  Investigations in South Africa have revealed disturbing evidence of organised crime, including: the frequent involvement of a small number of Vietnamese nationals in rhino hunting, often on the same game ranches repeatedly; numerous cases whereby Vietnamese ‘trophy hunters’ paid above market price for rhino hunts, but then had to be instructed how to shoot and would completely forego any proper trophy preparation; the issuance of export permits for rhino trophies to Vietnamese nationals who had previously been identified in ongoing rhino crime investigations; the repeated involvement of Vietnam Embassy personnel or vehicles in the illegal procurement and movement of rhino horns within and out of South Africa, one of whom invoked ‘diplomatic immunity’ to avoid arrest; the belief in law enforcement circles that various rhino poaching incidents have directly involved Vietnamese buyers; and arrests of Vietnamese men and women in possession of illegal rhino horns.

  It is late January 2011. Two men are locked in conversation in the drab face-brick quadrangle of the Mokopane Magistrate’s Court, about 250 kilometres north of Johannesburg in Limpopo province. One of them – the lawyer – is a greying ambulance-chaser with the lined, papery skin of a chain-smoker. His shirt is rumpled, his tie askew. The other – the client – has a dark tan, the colour of coffee. He’s in his forties, balding, fit and a little unshaven. It is him I’ve come to see. Chris van Wyk, I’ve been told, is the man ‘who started it all’.

  The court convenes. A handful of spectators files into the lines of hard, wooden benches. Van Wyk takes his place in the dock. He stands upright, shoulders back, face expressionless. ‘All rise!’ an officious court orderly commands as Magistrate Gerhard Pretorius, robed in red and black, enters the room. Van Wyk knows the drill. Twice before, he’s been found guilty and convicted of illegally trading and transporting rhino horn and elephant ivory. In one instance he was out on bail, awaiting trial, when he committed the offence. In another he was caught in a police sting operation trying to buy rhino horn. Both cases resulted in fines.

  Sentencing is quick. Pretorius sums up the case: It was 27 April 2006. Freedom Day. Van Wyk, a PH and taxidermist from Mossel Ba
y, and his Vietnamese client, Nguyen Tien Hoang, were at the Leshoka Thabang Game Lodge in Roedtan, Limpopo, to hunt a rhino. They had gone out with another group of South Africans, including the father and wife of the safari owner who had arranged the hunt.

  The hunters found their prey easily enough. The hunting permit was in Nguyen’s name. Consequently, he was required to fire the first shot. Instead, he turned his back on the scene and walked away, stopping after a short distance. Three of the others, including Van Wyk, then took aim and fired. The rhino was hit four times at a distance of between fifty and 100 metres. None of the shooters had hunting permits. After they were arrested, two of them turned State witness against Van Wyk. In exchange, the charges against them were dropped.

  Magistrate Pretorius is cutting. The hunt, and others like it, is ‘a circus in which twenty-three people get in a vehicle and watch as animals are shot dead’, he says.

  ‘The prison doors are coming closer and opening wider for you,’ he warns Van Wyk. But not today … Van Wyk is fined R30 000 or, if he can’t pay it, 1 000 days in prison. The rhino trophy from the hunt and a Musgrave .375 rifle are to be forfeited to the State. Van Wyk is also disqualified from obtaining any hunting permits to hunt in Limpopo for the next three years. But there is nothing preventing him from hunting elsewhere. Significantly, the court does not declare him unfit to possess a firearm.

  The fine is quickly paid. It is what Van Wyk and his lawyer had been expecting. Twenty minutes later, we’re in a noisy coffee and internet cafe across the road. Van Wyk is smiling, relieved. He speaks softly, his voice barely rising above the din. He trots out the usual platitudes. The sentence is fair, he says. Anyway, it was all a ‘technical mistake’.

  I tell Van Wyk what I’ve heard about him: that he’s the man who opened the floodgates to Vietnamese pseudo-hunters and, in effect, ‘created’ the Asian demand for trophies as a ‘legal’ source for black-market medicine.

  ‘I wouldn’t say I created it,’ he says. ‘There was always a market. I just filled it.’

  He says he was approached by an exporter in 2003. He won’t name him. The man asked him if it was legal for Vietnamese nationals to hunt rhino in South Africa. Van Wyk said that it was. The man then asked him to make the arrangements. The hunt took place in KwaZulu-Natal. ‘It was a legal hunt,’ Van Wyk hastens to add.

  Seven years later, ‘the rhino market is Vietnamese’.

  ‘There are three or four agents who contact me about clients. There are probably about fifteen to eighteen hunters who regularly deal with the Vietnamese … I’m one of the smallest. I deal with it like I would deal with any hunting inquiry I get. I assess whether it is viable, whether it is possible and whether it is legal. If those three criteria are met, then I send them a quotation and, if the hunter accepts it, then that’s that.’

  And the clients are prepared to pay big money, he says; anything from R300 000 up, depending on the weight of the horn. Van Wyk has no interest in knowing what happens to the trophy after it is shipped. ‘I’ve never been overseas. I don’t know what goes on there. All I do is when the hunter comes out, I apply for the permit, arrange the hunt, prepare the trophy and crate it.’

  It is the same wilful ignorance I frequently encounter in discussions with other professional hunters about the Vietnamese hunts.

  Van Wyk blames the dramatic increase in poaching since 2003 on progressively tighter government regulations. Legal hunting, he argues, offers a pressure release of sorts. ‘Poaching grew as the regulations were tightened. I think that when the Vietnamese could hunt legally, it limited the demand [for poached horn] to some degree. There are now major impediments being put in the way of the guys who really want to hunt legally. And because it is getting increasingly difficult for the Vietnamese to get their hands on rhino horn through legal hunting, a much bigger illegal market is being created.

  ‘At one stage there were about 100 rhinos being hunted by Vietnamese. Now suddenly it has dropped to twenty. But the demand remains 100. That won’t change over the next five or ten years. There will always be a demand. Poaching continues because the market still exists.’

  Van Wyk argues that legal trade should be allowed, although under strict conditions.

  ‘Private farmers and entrepreneurs ploughed millions into conservation and have done more for wildlife than the state or any province. Despite this, those guys have got no say over what they can do with their rhinos. To dehorn rhinos and lock the horns in a safe doesn’t work. All you’re doing is creating a market for yourself in the hope that the laws will change and trade will be allowed.’

  Van Wyk claims, without any apparent irony, that he and other hunters are being unfairly tarred. ‘Not all BMW drivers are road hogs. So if one guy goes and does things in a manner which is not ethical, he gives everyone a bad name.’

  Not long after our meeting, according to hunting records, Van Wyk accompanied two more Vietnamese clients, Tran Khanh Toan and Trinh Tich Nam, to hunt rhinos on Leeuwbosch farm in Stella, North West province.

  And it would seem that Nguyen Tien Hoang, the Vietnamese client who caused all the trouble, wasn’t scared off either. He returned to South Africa and was issued a permit to hunt a rhino in April 2010.

  ‘If it pays, it stays’ is the refrain commonly heard in hunting and game-farming circles. To survive, animals must have a commercial value that can be exploited. The rarer the species, the greater the value, the more the demand … They call it ‘sustainable use’, a nebulous term that can mean vastly different things to different people. The term gained currency in conservation circles in the late 1980s. Today it has become a hackneyed buzzword, used frequently and unthinkingly.

  Steve Irwin, the late Australian environmentalist and television presenter, dubbed the ‘Crocodile Hunter’, dismissed ‘sustainable use’ as the ‘greatest propaganda in wildlife conservation at the moment’. Elsewhere, it has been called the ‘most volatile and divisive conservation issue of the decade’.

  Dr Rosalind Reeve, an environmental lawyer and associate fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs in London, who has conducted extensive research on the CITES treaty, argues that while some promote the idea of sustainable use ‘in the genuine belief that it provides the only means to save endangered species in the wild, others undoubtedly misuse it for their own ends … Unscrupulous traders often find it a convenient peg on which to hang their activities and justify what sometimes amounts to little more than habitat-stripping.’

  Michele Pickover, a leading animal-rights campaigner in South Africa, says South Africa’s ‘current policy of “resource use” has the effect of reducing biodiversity significantly and increasing the number of threatened species, because it alters the way ecosystems function’. South Africa, she writes, has ‘the highest estimated rate of extinctions for any area in the world, with 37 per cent of its mammal species threatened’. And environmentalist Gareth Patterson describes the ‘lethal use of wildlife in South Africa [a]s a blood-thirsty, money-hungry blot on the national landscape’.

  Dr Hector Magome, head of conservation at SANParks, the national parks authority, speaks bluntly about ‘business-orientated conservation’.

  ‘Wildlife must be used to reduce poverty, otherwise we will lose our parks,’ he has often argued. For both SANParks and the private game industry, rhinos are a money spinner. Between 2008 and 2011, for example, sales of white rhinos generated R236 million (about $35 million). SANParks alone made over R100 million in those three years.

  John Hume, the largest private rhino owner in the world, contends that ‘just as we would accept sacrificing a number of animals to their natural predators, we should be prepared to sacrifice a number of them to humans to eat or use as trophies or for any reason that makes them more commercially viable and therefore more desirable for farmers to want to farm with them’.

  Game farmers I interviewed routinely had the same thing to say: ‘This is not a charity; it’s a business. We spend millions on keeping and fee
ding our animals and we expect a return on our investment.’

  Ian Player, the doyen of South African conservation and the man credited with saving South Africa’s rhinos from extinction in the 1960s, argues that there is no place for sentimentality, or ‘eco-emotion’, as he calls it, when it comes to conservation.

  ‘Through death there is life,’ he says. ‘The great irony is that rhino were nearly wiped out in the nineteenth century by hunters. But it is through hunting in the twentieth century that rhino populations have exploded. When South Africa put the rhino back on the hunting list in the late 1960s and early 1970s, [it] was the beginning of the game-ranching industry. The game farmers were buying rhino for a couple of hundred rand, selling them to European and American hunters for $25 000; then taking that money and putting it back into conservation and buying more land and buying more rhino.’

  Legal sport hunting of white rhino resumed in 1968. At the time there were only 1 800 of the animals in the entire country. Forty-five years later, that number has increased tenfold. TRAFFIC’s August 2012 report – a wide-ranging study of the ‘rhino horn trade nexus’ between South Africa and Vietnam – states that: ‘Rather than hindering population growth, trophy hunting is widely regarded as having been a positive force by contributing to biological management, range expansion, the generation of revenue for conservation authorities and incentives for wildlife conservation …’

  The 1970s saw poaching in Africa and Asia reach terrifying new levels. A severe drought in much of Tanzania and Kenya had a devastating effect on elephant and rhino populations. Rhinos, competing with elephants for what little bush there was to eat, starved by the hundreds. In 1969, Kenya had as many as 20 000 rhinos. By the early 1980s, as a result of drought and poaching, that figure had plummeted to 1 500.