In reality, probably not many of them. If any. The modern narrative of who’s poaching and where animal parts end up is very much entrenched in the pulp novels of the 20s and 30s. Most people think of poachers as either a Percival McLeach/Negaverse Steve Irwin/old white guy with a mustache… or as a poor African. But the reality’s a lot more complex and the media’s bad at picking up on it for a lot of reasons- largely because people hate nuance and don’t understand the difference between illegal poaching (always bad) and legal, regulated trophy hunting (complicated. sometimes bad. sometimes good. depends on the situation, the reality of where conservation dollars are coming from, and whether or not you believe one animal can or cannot be sacrificed for the good of the species.)
So here’s the thing about rhino hunting: it’s perfectly legal IF you have the permits. It’s just expensive. You have to get the permit to hunt and the permit to import back to your home country. Rhinos selected for hunting are old, post-reproductive bulls. They’re not really genetically valuable anymore, and having the ability to sell hunting rights encourages African landowners to keep rhinos on their land. Trophy hunts aren’t figured into the poaching numbers… at all. When they say that poaching has gone up or down, they are not including trophy hunting because those numbers are totalled separately. Trophy hunters have to buy permits, and this is not a financial problem for them. While it’s not completely unheard of (there’s one guy in particular, a South African big game rancher/hunter named Dawie Groenenwald, who did bring in twelve Americans to trophy hunt on his land- read more about that here: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/), that’s not where the real money is. I’m certainly not saying that all trophy hunting is legitimate or even if any of it’s a good idea. What I’m saying is that it’s irrelevant to the poaching numbers.
The people killing these rhinos aren’t taking them as trophies.
They’re selling the horns in Vietnam.
Other Asian countries too, mostly China and anywhere that’s had significant sinicization, but Vietnam’s burgeoning economy and the meteoric rise of an emergent upper-middle business class has meant that it’s where all that rhino horn is going. It’s a status symbol, a way to curry favor with business higher ups (Source: http://www.poachingfacts.com/faces-of-the-poachers/buyers-of-rhino-horn/). This isn’t even a secret. The people who traffic rhino horn say openly where it goes (Source: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2016/10/dark-world-of-the-rhino-horn-trade/). They talk about how it gets there, and who does the killing. It’s an enormous industry and immensely valuable. TRAFFIC has been working on this for over a decade now, figuring out who’s killing the rhinos and where the horns are going. Nine years ago, the first big report from TRAFFIC came out on the trade from the African rhino-having countries to Asia. Here’s the link to that: http://awsassets.panda.org/downloads/trafficrhinoreportsummary.pdf
Nat Geo did the numbers again in 2015, in that article I linked above. Things haven’t changed much since then.
The reason poaching went down during covid isn’t that the actual hunters weren’t allowed to travel. (Besides, do you really think that if it was rich white dudes doing the majority of the poaching, it would have slowed down or stopped? Money, dear boy, can get you pretty much anything you want. A chartered flight to Kenya, a private home to stay in… a rhino permit or two…) Rather, the middleman dried up. It’s only profitable to kill a rhino if you can move the parts, and if your middleman isn’t traveling between the rhino countries and the Asian market, well…
And you can probably guess who the middlemen are. Often they’re students. Frequently they’re workers. And until recently, they were mostly Vietnamese or Chinese nationals. Now, TRAFFIC notes that many rhino horn syndicates are using white South Africans due to heightened suspicion. (Source: http://english.vietnamnet.vn/fms/environment/125451/profiling-ups-risk-for-asian-rhino-horn-mules.html)
And normally, there actually is a lot of traffic between China and Vietnam and the rhino countries. I don’t know if people here are quite aware of the relationship between China and several African countries- particularly Kenya, but there’s been a lot of Asian investment into Africa. In Kenya, you see a lot of Chinese workers coming in, working on development projects, and then going back to China. Something like 20% of African infrastructure projects are funded by China; one out of every three is built by Chinese firms. (source: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-07-19/china-s-belt-and-road-leaves-kenya-with-a-railroad-to-nowhere). Most of the part-time labor is local (source: http://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/801581468195561492/pdf/WPS7614.pdf), but not all of it- and the full time labor, while mostly local, is roughly 22% Chinese citizens. There were well over 150,000 Chinese workers in Africa before the pandemic (source: http://www.sais-cari.org/data-chinese-workers-in-africa). You also saw a lot of Vietnamese workers… before the pandemic. Both China and Vietnam called their citizens home pretty quickly. Vietnam in particular. By July 2020, arrangements for most Vietnamese workers in Africa had come through after a good deal of public outcry, and they were back in Vietnam (source: https://saigoneer.com/vietnam-news/19011-stuck-in-guinea-equatorial,-vietnamese-workers-forced-to-work-despite-rampant-covid-19-cases).
No middlemen, no profit. No profit, no poaching. It’s not a triumphant story of white trophy hunters butting out of a place they don’t belong; it’s a much more complicated story of economic oppression of native Kenyans, South Africans, and citizens of other rhino countries and exported Vietnamese and Chinese workers.
Poaching isn’t what it used to be. It’s gotten a lot more complex, and reducing it to something that hasn’t been true since the 1950s-1970s means that we ignore the real problems and direct our energy into something that isn’t happening. It’s like… how when a corporation tells you to take personal responsibility for climate change. This isn’t a single person sneering and shooting a rhino. This is an entire industry that CITES and other NGOs are trying hard to grapple with. The nature of the beast has fundamentally changed. I get that it’s really easy to blame Europe and America for the shit that’s been done to subsaharan Africa’s natural resources. It’s right, too, but… the story of people attempting to extract resources from the continent isn’t over. Ignoring that the market for rhino horn isn’t the trophy industry just makes it easier for that particular black market to go unchecked.
Additional sources and information:
https://www.savetherhino.org/what-we-do/reducing-illegal-trade/
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/rich-men-rhino-horns/529455/
https://www.savetherhino.org/thorny-issues/trophy-hunting-and-sustainable-use-rhinos/
http://www.poachingfacts.com/poaching-statistics/rhino-poaching-statistics/
https://www.fws.gov/international/permits/black-rhino-import-permit.html- this oughta give you an idea on what a US import permit entails. If you have the money and time, it’s… really not that hard to hunt a rhino.
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