JOHANNESBURG – The owner of a South African rhino conservation farm, the world’s largest, plans to auction off his 2,000-strong herd online in April.
The southern white rhinoceros at the Platinum Rhino breeding project in South Africa’s North West province are becoming too expensive to keep, and no money has been made available to resettle them in the wild, a spokesman for the project told Johannesburg’s Beeld newspaper.
“Breeding rhinos is an expensive game,” Platinum’s 81-year-old founder John Hume told AFP on Monday, adding that he had been breeding rhinos “for 30 years without profit”.
South Africa is home to about 80 per cent of the world’s rhino population, but poaching has taken a huge toll despite increased protection efforts on both private reserves and at national and regional parks.
The country has been battling poachers for more than a decade, and has lost more than 1,000 of the animals to criminals every year from 2013 until 2017.
In February, the government said 448 rhinos were killed across the country in 2022, just three fewer than in 2021, as poachers increasingly targeted privately owned reserves instead of national parks.
The animal’s horns consist mainly of hard keratin, the same substance found in human nails. Yet, they are highly sought after on black markets for use in traditional medicines in Asian countries such as China and Vietnam, where they are believed to cure cancer and other ailments.
“Preventing poaching took a huge monetary toll,” said Mr Hume, adding that it cost him up to half a million rand (S$37,000) to breed a rhino up to the age of four years old at his farm, which employs around 100 people.
He said he is looking for a buyer “with a passion for conserving rhinos and the means to keep the breeding project going”.
In 2022, Mr Hume announced plans to release 100 farm-bred rhinos into the wild each year, which the farm’s chief veterinarian, Dr Michelle Otto, said “could repopulate the whole of Africa” if there was sufficient funding for the project.
In 2017, Mr Hume also sparked controversy by organising a three-day online auction of horns he had amassed by sawing them off the rhinos in order to prevent the animals from getting killed by poachers, though the sale attracted fewer buyers than anticipated.
Platinum Rhino is home to over 16 per cent of South Africa’s southern white rhino population, according to the company. The subspecies of white rhino is now considered endangered, with about 20,000 individuals remaining, according to the World Wildlife Fund. AFP, BLOOMBERG
