Rhino horn means big business to wildlife traffickers, and the growing demand for it as traditional Chinese medicine -- despite the fact that it has no medicinal properties -- has exploded into a poaching epidemic across Africa and Asia.
Poachers are slaughtering rhinos, already threatened with extinction, by the hundreds every year for the payoff. Not even nursing mothers have been spared the corruption and greed, leaving their dependent calves on their own to grieve and starve.
Sadly, in South Africa -- home to 70 percent of the world’s rhinos -- trophy hunting of rhinos is legal. But now, with poaching at an all-time high, the South African Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs is considering a moratorium on all rhino hunting, a bold move that would at the very least give rhinos some of the protection they desperately need.
South Africa allows hunters to take horns back home as trophies, so people from Asian countries have traveled to the country as "hunters." Hundreds of horns have ended up in East Asia, almost certainly for the traditional medicine trade.
A full moratorium on rhino hunting would close any such loopholes.Take Action and Sign Up for this cause.
