Last month, poachers broke into the Thoiry Zoological Park just outside Paris and brutally slaughtered a beloved four-year-old white rhinoceros there in order to saw off his horn, ostensibly to be sold on the black market in East Asia.
According to Chinese and Vietnamese mumbo-jumbo pseudoscience, concoctions made from powdered rhino horn are believed to have mystical aphrodisiacal or medicinal properties.
And that baseless claptrap inanity is responsible for the tragic depletion of most of the world’s highly endangered rhino populations.
Although the perverse and barbarous trade in rhino horns was banned by a United Nations convention in 1977, the insidious underground market continues to thrive, with a single kilo of bootlegged horn powder raking in about $54,000.
Of the five remaining rhinoceros species in the world, four are in eminent danger of extinction.
According to the international nonprofit Save the Rhino foundation, there are less than 29,000 rhinos in the wild in Asia and Africa today, compared to more than 500,000 at the beginning of the 20th century.
Between 1970 and 1993, massive poaching decimated the African black rhino population by 96 percent, from 65,000 animals to just 2,300, and while conservation efforts have since led to a slight increase in the number of black rhinos, the species is still considered critically endangered by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)
There are barely 3,500 greater one-horned Indian rhinos left in the wild, and less than 100 Sumatran rhinos still in existence.
The lesser one-horned Javan rhinos number about 60.
And the entire current population of the northern African white rhino (which once numbered in the tens of thousands and roamed loftily across the savannahs of Africa) is THREE!
These two females and one male are all well past their reproductive years and now live at Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Kenya, where they are accompanied at all times by an entourage of four to six armed Kenyan soldiers who are there to protect them from poachers.
It is only a matter of time until the entire northern African white rhino subspecies is gone forever.
According to WWF figures, in 2016, at least 1,054 rhinos were poached in South Africa alone (the epicenter of the rhino-poaching epidemic), representing a 10 percent decline from the comparable 2015 figure of 1,175, but still disturbing more than the 2005 figure of 36 and the 2011 figure of 448.
Ironically, despite the chimeric myths that rhino horn can cure cancer or give a man an erection, every major scientific study has proven these claims to be pure, unadulterated bunk.
The American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine has categorically condemned the use of rhino parts for the treatment of any ailment, and added that “there is no traditional use nor evidence for the effectiveness of rhino horn as a cure for cancer.”
The Swiss pharmaceutical company Hoffmann-LaRoche conducted studies on the medicinal values of rhino horns during the 1980s, which were followed by similar research at the Chinese University in Hong Kong 10 years later, and both found no positive effects.
Simply put, rhino horn, like human hair and fingernails, is composed of entirely of keratin, and, as the international Saving Rhinos foundation astutely pointed out, have “no analgesic, anti-inflammatory, anti-spasmolytic nor diuretic properties” and “no bactericidal effect could be found against suppuration and intestinal bacteria” (i.e, it doesn’t work against pain, inflammation, muscle spasm, stomach ailments or cleaning up wounds).
And it isn’t going to give anyone a hard-on.
As Dr. Raj Amin of the London Zoological Society put it: “Medically, consuming rhinoceros horn is the same as if you were chewing your own nails.”
The senseless and coldblooded slaughter of the world’s precarious rhino populations to appease a pertinacious and cynical demand for a product that is not even effective is a cruel and callous act of inhumanity and utter stupidity.
Vince, the rhino killed at the Thoiry Zoo, is just one more victim of the contemptuous plundering and illicit marketing of the world’s precious but dwindling wildlife resources.
Thérèse Margolis can be reached at [email protected].
