John Hume runs the largest rhino farm in the world in South Africa – and is convinced that it is people like him that make the survival of the animal possible in the first place. So why shouldn’t he be allowed to sell their horn?
Rhinos do not see well. This is often their undoing, but it can also be an advantage. In the case of John Hume’s rhinos, for example, who keeps the animals in his unspectacular country estate, just a few kilometers outside the desolate South African mining town of Klerksdorp. The pachyderms probably do not notice their barren and almost treeless surroundings – nor that they are surrounded by a two meter high fence with cameras. However, you will have noticed that you are not alone on the 8,000 hectare property. Rather, you have to share it with almost 2000 conspecifics. Hume owns the largest rhinoceros farm in the world. The almost 80-year-old farmer could be a $ 500 millionaire.
A night vision camera also hangs at the gate to the “Buffalo Dream Farm”: after a brief visual inspection of the visitor, the steel gate retracts. It’s another three kilometers to the manor house, croaks from the intercom. One should follow the signs. The first rhino family can be seen right behind the gate, and many more will follow within a few hundred meters. What all rhinos have in common is that instead of a long horn they only have a stump on their snout.
Two off-road vehicles appear around a bend, chasing a rhinoceros. A young woman fires a shot from the first vehicle. A syringe drills into the rhinoceros’s rear. It stops, puzzled, shakes itself, shrugs its legs and finally collapses.
Now five men rush out of the second vehicle and heave the collapsed colossus into a reasonably comfortable position. One measures the length of his horn, another puts a thermometer in his bottom. A third person tampered with his horn with a jigsaw, while a fourth sprinkled water on the nose process so that it does not catch flames from the heat of the saw. Meanwhile, a fifth person catches the falling horn shavings in a small box. Every gram of rhinoceros keratin is worth more than gold or cocaine. A single kilogram of horn could make John Hume $ 60,000 on the black market.
When the nasal process is severed, it is weighed and marked in red ink. An armed courier later takes him to John Hume’s treasury. Thousands of horns with a total weight of eight tons are allegedly already stored in the top secret location.
In purely mathematical terms, the farmer could convert this into 480 million US dollars on the black market. But in reality the treasure is worth no more to Hume than a load of garbage. The rhino farmer is not allowed to sell his stock abroad because at least international trade in rhino horn has been banned for more than four decades. A lot of money could be made with the hardened nasal processes, especially in China and Vietnam, where keratin is considered a miracle cure for cancer, epilepsy and impotence.
John Hume sits in a spacious office of his farmhouse, which is decorated with countless rhino paintings, and stabs the biscuit that is served with tea with his hunting knife. The farmer scolds: “We are saving one of the most threatened animal species in the world from extinction and we are also being punished for it.” The former mine concessionaire and developer of holiday complexes has, in his own words, all his assets in the Raising rhinos invested many millions of dollars. “Now I’m broke,” complains Hume – which is primarily due to the worldwide “Bunny-Huggern”. You would have blown people like him to hunt.
Until a good ten years ago, at least trading in rhinos was allowed within South Africa, explains the rhino farmer. But shortly before the soccer World Cup in South Africa, the environment minister also imposed a moratorium on domestic trade. Hume complains that the government wanted to make a good impression for the World Cup. In doing so, however, he turned the wrong people into scapegoats: It is primarily thanks to private wildlife farmers that the number of southern white rhinos has recovered from a few hundred 50 years ago to almost 20,000 specimens today. Two thirds of them live on private game farms.
Breeding wild animals is only possible in southern Africa. There, white ranchers still enforced in colonial times that wild animals belong not to the state, but to the owners of the land on which they cavort. On the southern tip of the continent, a lively market with wild animals developed, which change hands at auctions and are transported to their new home in trucks or even helicopters.
Before the big wave of poaching, which peaked in 2015, rhinos fetched up to $ 30,000 at auctions. But with the moratorium, the market collapsed and the wave of poaching brought it to a complete standstill. In the current circumstances, no one wants a rhino anymore because the measures necessary to protect it from poachers are far too expensive.
Still, John Hume did not give up hope. Together with another rhino farmer, he sued the moratorium – and won. Domestic trade had to be resumed four years ago. The court ruling encouraged Hume to bet on the resumption of international trade. The government fueled such hopes. At every conference of the Washington Convention on Species Conservation, South Africa and its neighbors applied for at least a temporary permit to trade in rhinoceros and ivory – to enable farmers to sell their stocks, which they can then continue to use to protect the pachyderms could finance.
In this way, the poachers are dug up, says Hume. Because customers from China and Vietnam could then use the legal market and would not have to switch to the black market. “It’s a win-win-win situation,” says rhino farmer Hume. It is a victory for everyone: for the animals, for those who breed them and for the consumers.
Nevertheless, the applications from southern Africa at the “Cites” conferences were regularly thrown out. They pointed to negative experiences with the temporary lifting of the trade ban. Legalization has led to an increase in poaching twice. Instead of flooding the black market, it was apparently given wings. He doesn’t believe in these numbers, says John Hume: “These are rumors spread by the donation-heavy non-governmental organizations.”
After the farmer has killed the third biscuit with his knife, he starts talking about his ecological creed: “Only what pays stays” – only what pays off is preserved. If the protection of animals does not bring economic success, their conservation is also excluded. Hardly surprisingly, this credo is shared by almost all private game farmers. Surprisingly, however, the government led by the African National Congress (ANC) also accepted. For many years she herself watched the goings-on on the 350 or so South African lion farms, where more than 8000 kings of animals are treated like slaughter cattle by their breeders. As babies, they are fed to well-paying tourists to cuddle, barely having grown up, they are led to the guns of much better-paying “big game hunters” from overseas.
After the shooting, the courageous hunters are allowed to keep the lion’s head and fur as a trophy, while the farmer keeps the rest to himself. He separates the lion bones from the meat, lets them dry, grind them into powder and send them to the Far East. There it is dissolved in hot water and drunk as a power tea, which is supposed to provide potency and muscle mass.
Until recently it was all legal. Despite years of protests by international animal welfare organizations, the almost exclusively black ANC government did not stand in the way of the almost exclusively white lion killers: When it comes to making money, the unequal parties pull in the same direction – at least that was the case until the end of last month.
But then Barbara Creesy, South Africa’s Minister for Forestry, Fisheries and Nature Conservation, presented the public with an almost 600-page report that a 25-person commission had drawn up over the past two years. Their mission: to regulate the proper handling of four of the most prominent South African wild animal species – elephants, lions, rhinos and leopards.
The résumé of the commission, which was made up of scientists, conservationists, government officials, farmers and representatives of the villagers living in the vicinity of nature reserves, was surprisingly and surprisingly unanimous: almost all commissioners spoke out in favor a ban on lion farms, against the legalization of the rhino trade and a realignment of official animal protection – away from economic and towards ecological aspects. “At Cites, we will no longer push for a liberalization of the rhino horn trade,” announced Barbara Creezy.
The change of course hit John Hume’s rhino farm like a bomb. Although the landlord has not yet read the 600-page report and therefore does not want to make a detailed comment, at least one thing is certain: “I will either sell Buffalo Dream or have to find a second investor.” Simply shut down the farm: “What will become of the animals then?” The question arises in any case.
