Support plans to relocate South African white rhinos endangered by poachers to TX

  • by: Patte Romal
  • recipient: USDA US Department of Agriculture

Home to 80% of the planet’s rhino population, South Africa is currently experiencing a poaching epidemic. Last week, South Africa’s environment minister revealed that a record 393 animals were killed in the country’s Kruger National Park between January and April of this year. The animals’ horns fetch a high price – $65,000 for just over 2lb – in markets such as China and Vietnam, where rhino horn is an ingredient in traditional medicines. Illegal rhino killings increased 20% in 2014, with 1,215 rhinos dead.

Conservation groups, representatives of the South African government and individual supporters – such as private ranchers – in both regions are just beginning to consider the Texas relocation plan.

The proposed relocation scheme would move rhinos to individual ranches in Texas, and the relocation plan would provide South African ranchers with partial ownership of the transported rhinos’ offspring. Private ranchers own roughly 5,000 of South Africa’s estimated 20,000 white and black rhinos, and these ranchers have good reason to cooperate with a scheme that might preserve the population.

But the plan must overcome several challenges before it can move forward: it must get approval from the US Department of Agriculture to import the animals; it must find enough ranchers in Texas who want to take the rhinos; and it must raise the funds to move the creatures, at an estimated cost of at least $50,000 per rhinoceros.

If the plan goes forward, the rhinos will roam free on ranch land and there will be a prohibition on hunting them or their progeny in perpetuity, said Jonathan Tager of Group Elephant.

Cont'd reading: http://www.theguardian.com/vital-signs/2015/may/11/poaching-white-rhino-south-africa-texas-rhinoceros?CMP=fb_gu

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