Expert: Rhino population wiped out in Mozambique

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — Mozambique's rhinoceros population was wiped out more than a century ago by big game hunters. Reconstituted several years ago, the beasts again are on the brink of vanishing from the country by poachers seeking their horns for sale in Asia.

A leading expert told The Associated Press that the last rhino in the southern African nation has been killed. The warden of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park — the only place where the horned behemoths lived in Mozambique — also says poachers have wiped out the rhinos. Mozambique's conservation director believes a few may remain.

Elephants also could vanish in Mozambique soon, the warden of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, Antonio Abacar, told AP. He said game rangers have been aiding poachers, and 30 of the park's 100 rangers will appear in court soon.

"We caught some of them red-handed while directing poachers to a rhino area," Abacar said.

A game ranger arrested for helping poachers in Mozambique's northern Niassa Game Reserve said on Mozambican Television TVM last week that he was paid 2,500 meticais (about $80) to direct poachers to areas with elephants and rhinos. Game rangers are paid between 2,000 and 3,000 meticais ($64 to $96) a month.

While guilty rangers will lose their jobs, the courts serve as little deterrent to the poachers: killing wildlife and trading in illegal rhino horn and elephant tusks are only misdemeanors in Mozambique.

"Their legal system is far from adequate and an individual found guilty is given a slap on the wrist and then they say 'OK. Give me my horn back,'" said Michael H. Knight, chairman of the African Rhino Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Species Survival Commission.

A meeting of the group in February reported there might, possibly, be one white rhino left in Mozambique and no black rhinos at all, Knight said.

According to Abacar: "We have already announced the extinction of the rhino population in Limpopo National Park."

But Bartolomeu Soto, director of Mozambique's transfrontier conservation unit, told the AP, "We believe we still have rhinos, though we don't know how many."

Mozambican news reports have said the last 15 rhinos in the park were slaughtered in the past month, but park officials said those reports were wrong. Soto said the misunderstanding had arisen over Abacar's statement to journalists that he had not seen a rhino in the three months since he was put in charge of the large park.

The only official figure available for rhino deaths is that 17 of their carcasses were found in the park in 2010, Soto said. He said officials believe poaching must be taking place because rhino horn and elephant tusks carried by Asian smugglers are regularly seized at Mozambique's ports, although at least some of the contraband could be from animals killed by Mozambican poachers in neighboring South Africa. This week a person was arrested at the airport of the capital, Maputo, in possession of nine rhino horns, Soto said.

The price of rhino horn has overtaken the price of gold as demand has burgeoned in Asian countries, mainly China and Vietnam, where consumers wrongly believe that the horn — made of the same substance as fingernails — has powerful healing properties. Chinese traditional medicine prescribes it for everything from typhoid, infant convulsions and fever to an antidote for poison and to relieve arthritis and cure possessions by the devil. Syndicates from Vietnam, China, South Korea and Thailand have been identified as being involved in the trafficking.

Knight said rhinos first vanished from Mozambique around the turn of the last century, in the age of the big white hunters, when the animals also nearly disappeared in South Africa, now home to 90 percent of Africa's estimated 20,000 white rhinos and 4,880 black rhinos.

In 2002, leaders of Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe agreed to establish a transfrontier park straddling their borders and covering some 35,000 square kilometers (13,514 square miles) of the best established wildlife areas in southern Africa with South Africa's famed Kruger National Park and Zimbabwe's Gonarezhou National Park. It is funded by several international wildlife organizations and the European Union.

Soto said some 5,000 animals of various species were moved from South Africa to Mozambique, including the first 12 rhinos to roam in Mozambique in a century.

In 2006, South Africa removed some 50 kilometers (30 miles) of fence between Kruger and Limpopo National Park. Soto said the entire 200 kilometers (125 miles) of fence was not removed because Mozambique still is working to resettle some 6,000 people living in the park.

A second phase was to include two other Mozambican parks, allowing the transfrontier park to extend over 100,000 square kilometers (39,000 square miles) that would make it "the world's largest animal kingdom," according to the South African Peace Parks Foundation.

Those plans now are in danger, as is the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. Knight said South African officials are even discussing rebuilding their fence with Mozambique.

South African officials say their country has lost 273 rhinos to poachers so far this year. They say most have been killed by Mozambicans who cross into Kruger Park. Poachers killed 668 rhinos in South Africa last year.

The slaughter continues with the number of deaths increasing even though South Africa has declared war on rhino poachers and for two years has deployed soldiers and police in Kruger, a vast park which is the size of Israel.

Soto said Mozambique's government has been working since 2009 on a comprehensive reform of environmental laws involving consultations with all stakeholders. He said he expects the draft legislation to be presented to parliament soon. It includes criminalizing the shooting of wildlife and would impose mandatory prison sentences on offenders.

But it will come too late to save the last of the rhinos in Mozambique.

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Associated Press writer Emmanuel Camillo contributed to this report from Maputo, Mozambique.

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South Africa: fight over rhino poaching escalates

JOHANNESBURG (AP) — A U.S. firm recently gave smart phones to some game rangers in South Africa to help them track poachers who kill rhinos for their horns. An anti-poaching ad campaign in Vietnam, a key illegal market, shows rhinos with human hands or feet in place of horns, which are made from the same material as fingernails and toenails.

Despite these and other globe-spanning projects to protect the rhinoceros, the rate of poaching in South Africa — home to most of Africa's rhinos — this year is on track to exceed the record number of illegal kills in 2012, conservation officials say. The more money, innovation and publicity go into the cause, the more poachers, who see rhino horn as a high-priced commodity, seemingly diversify their hunt.

It resembles a tit-for-tat escalation, similar to the old arcade game "Whac-a-Mole," in which disparate campaigns can target a poaching tactic or location only for the killing to pop up in other places and forms.

"The demand seems to be such that every time there's a clampdown in one area, another issue emerges," said Dr. Jo Shaw, a rhino expert in South Africa for the World Wildlife Fund.

South Africa, a haven-turned-killing ground, was once a big success. The intensity of the battle here has since made it a crucible for experiments and policy debates on how to stop poachers seeking to meet surging demand in some Asian countries. Consumers covet rhino horn after it is ground into a powder as a balm for health, despite no supporting evidence.

A South African opposition party has urged the government to label rhino poaching as a national disaster, allowing the allocation of disaster management funds to fight poaching. The Democratic Alliance also called for more discussion about legalizing the trade in rhino horns, which can grow back after cutting.

"A total ban on rhino horn trade will eventually lead to the complete extinction of the species. A regulated and controlled trade would supply demand and dismantle poaching syndicates through open market pressures," opposition lawmaker Anthony Benadie said in a statement.

Some conservationists warn that a legal trade would not necessarily stamp out the illegal one. Besides, it would require the approval of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species, or CITES. The group, which has 173 signatory countries, met in Bangkok in March and won't meet again for three years.

Poachers killed 668 rhinos in South Africa in 2012, a 50 percent increase over the previous year. On April 18, South Africa said 232 rhino had been illegally killed so far this year, 70 percent of them in the vast Kruger National Park.

"The patterns keep indicating that it will be over 800" this year, said Shaw of the World Wildlife Fund.

She said the number of white and black rhinos in South Africa, 19,000 and 2,000 respectively, is actually rising. By some estimates, however, the populations will reach a "tipping point" in 2016 and then decline if poaching persists.

Albi Modise, spokesman for South Africa's department of environmental affairs, said the use of gun silencers and other sophisticated equipment by poachers "requires that we up our game as well in terms of anti-poaching activity."

In one success, Shaw said, authorities have stopped Vietnamese and others killing rhinos in South Africa under the guise of legal trophy-hunting, and then illegally selling the horns abroad. South Africa regulates limited hunting of rhinos, though this practice is coming under increasing scrutiny.

The poaching crisis has triggered an array of measures whose effectiveness is hotly debated.

The private Sabi Sand game reserve has injected horns of some rhinos with a pink dye and chemicals that could sicken a person who ingests rhino horn. The tactic would be tough to implement in the nearby Kruger park, where rhinos are harder to track in the vast expanse and where rangers sometimes clash with armed poachers from neighboring Mozambique. CITES is pushing Mozambique to get tougher on poachers, and also urging Vietnam to take steps to curb demand.

Canvas, a Virginia-based technology company, equipped some rangers at the Sabi Sand reserve with smart phones this year. The devices enable them to swiftly share data and images — for example, footprints, holes cut in fences and animal carcasses — that help them patrol the bush and could eventually serve as courtroom evidence against suspected poachers.

James Quigley, head of Canvas, acknowledged there is a strong financial incentive behind poaching. The price of rhino horn has been compared to the U.S. street value of cocaine, a temptation for criminal syndicates, triggermen from poor villages and some corrupt officials.

"The risk versus reward becomes such that each side has to amplify just to keep in line with each other," Quigley said of the battle to stop poachers.

Tom Snitch, an American expert in imagery from satellites and drone aircraft, plans to test small drones in a South African game reserve in late May. He will use satellite imagery and mathematical models to plot flight paths based on predictions of the movements of both rhinos and poachers.

"If we see the poachers, we put the drones on top of them and basically vector them in where they can be apprehended," Snitch said. Some of the technology mirrors that used by U.S. forces to detect insurgents planting roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the fight against poachers is similarly cat-and-mouse, he said.

"You constantly have to refine your model in the anticipation that your adversary is learning your techniques and tactics," said Snitch, a visiting professor in computer studies at the University of Maryland.

South Africa has signed an anti-poaching deal with Vietnam, which has pledged more rigorous inspections of cargo, particularly from Africa, at land, air and sea entry points as well as public awareness campaigns. The World Wildlife Fund and TRAFFIC, a wildlife monitoring network, are launching an ad campaign on social media networks and elsewhere in Vietnam. One poster depicts hands and feet on a rhino's face, noting human nails and rhino horns are both made from a tough protein called keratin.

The caption reads: "Rhino horn is made of the same stuff as human nails. Still want some?"

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Sumatran rhino footprints believed found on Borneo

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) — Several footprints believed to be from critically endangered Sumatran rhino have been found on Indonesia's Borneo island, raising hopes for the existence of an animal long thought to be extinct in that area, a conservation group said Thursday.

The fresh tracks were discovered in February while a WWF team was monitoring orangutans in West Kutai forested district of East Kalimantan province, according to a statement.

A follow-up survey carried out by the team, along with government forestry officials and scientists from Mulawarman University, discovered more footprints, horn scratches at mud holes, trees used as rubbing posts and bite marks on plants. But the number of potential animals remains unclear.

The rhino has been thought to be extinct on Indonesia's part of Borneo since the 1990s. Fewer than 200 animals still live in the wild in Indonesia and Malaysia, threatened by loss of habitat and poaching.

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