Hunt a rhino, save an ecosystem?

Martin Brooks, chairman of the World Conservation Union's African Rhino Specialists Group, says controlled hunting of Southern African white rhino encouraged private land owners to stock their land with the large grazer, helping to pull the species from near extinction. Today there are more than 11,000 of the animals in the world, more than 10,000 of which are in South Africa. About 20 percent of South Africa's white rhinos live on private land, where strictly controlled hunting is allowed on a permit basis.

In contrast, black rhinos, which eat trees rather than grass, have made a slower recovery and there are only an estimated 3,610 in the world. According to the International Rhino Foundation, black rhino populations declined 92 percent between 1970 and 1992, hitting a low of 2,300 in 1992. South Africa wants to allow five to be hunted each year.

White rhinos can bring $30,000 in trophy rights, plus the cost of the safari and daily hunting fees. Black rhinos could bring an estimated $200,000 each, say hunting organizations.

Mr. Brooks, who used to work for the park system in one of South Africa's provinces, says allowing excess male black rhinos to be hunted each year could encourage private land owners to stock the animals. He says that parks like Hluhluwe-Imfolozi, South Africa's oldest, have long struggled with what to do when they had too many male black rhinos.

"If you're going to kill an animal, it makes sense that it should have some conservation benefit," he says. "If it's the private sector that does that ... then that's an incentive for them to invest in black rhino populations for breeding, which is good. If the formal conservation agency allows hunting, or sells the surplus animals to private owners, that money goes back into the parks system."

But Jason Bell of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) says the idea that nature conservation should be economically viable is dangerous one. "I think there's a very strong movement worldwide which is trying to promote the use of wildlife and natural resources, sometimes to the detriment of species," he says. "What we're seeing in Southern Africa is the view that natural resources need to have an economic value to have a place in our world."

The fundamental problem, says Rudi van Aarde, director of the Conservation Ecology Research Unit at the University of Pretoria, is that South Africa's parks are artificial spaces, essentially large zoos where natural processes no longer work to keep animal populations in check.

Unlike in East Africa, where animals are allowed to roam freely in and out of official parks, most of South Africa's parks are fenced and many have man-made water holes. This stops normal migration patterns. Van Aarde and supporters, including groups like IFAW, have a grand vision of interconnected, unfenced conservation areas. In these more-natural ecosystems, elephants would die naturally during normal drought cycles, and their impact in any specific area would be limited through natural movement.

"What's the benefit of this? We'll have large conservation areas instead of small conservation areas. We'll have natural limitation of numbers rather than unnatural limitation. We'll have cost-effective conservation instead of costly conservation," van Aarde says.

Page: 1 | 2