Online Sales of Rhino Horn to be Investigated

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February 21st, 2012

Anything that sells for $10,000 a pound must draw attention, right?

People are selling anything and everything these days in order to raise a little extra cash, and some are doing very well in this business, especially by selling “old” or “unwanted” goods that have been cluttering up their homes for years. But going out hunting and getting one’s hands on horns that have been poached or sawn off freshly killed animals has to be pretty low on the list of money-making ideas.

Rhino horns

Rhino horns are now being advertised illegally online, amid unprecedented poaching levels and soaring black market prices paid for them by international criminal syndicates.

An easily available advert on the internet describes a rhino horn as a "legally-registered" antique from Cameroon which can be shipped to you at any time. The latest online advertisements come amid concerns that genuine “antique” trophy rhino horns are also being bought at auctions in the UK and Europe and exported to the Far East to be crushed for use in traditional Chinese medicine and other cultures for ornamental or pseudo-scientific medicinal purposes. Rhinoceros horns, unlike those of other horned mammals, consist of keratin only and lack a bony core, such as bovine horns. These horns are also used for dagger handles in Yemen and Oman.

Adverts

“We got rhino horn for sale. We can ship the horns to your home at any time,” according to a recent advert on the Kerawa.com website. A second advert in the “for sale” column of the same website’s Ethiopian section says that the horns for sale are all older than 30 years and were “legally registered antiques under the ministry of agriculture and wildlife in Cameroon”. Posing as an import and export agency, a newspaper responded to one of the advertisements on Monday and received a reply soon afterwards from a “Mr. Mark Kwazula” who provided a telephone number in Douala, Cameroon. Mr. Kwazula said the horns were from rhinos that were culled in 1955 and that they were well preserved.

Price

Although it remains uncertain whether the seller is authentic or simply an online scamster, “Kwazula” said in his e-mail that he was selling the horns at $3,350 a pound. This price is fairly low, as illegal wildlife trade monitoring groups suggest that the going black market price for rhino horn in Africa is $10,000 per pound, while the price paid in Vietnam for shaved and powdered rhino horn has reached between $10,000 and $15,000 per pound.

Go hunting

Can you see yourself buying a hunting rifle, a good expensive one, because if your first shot doesn’t do the trick you may have a problem outrunning a very angry rhino. Then after the huge animal drops to his knees and finally rolls over dead, you whip out your hacksaw or whatever it takes to remove the horn and sit patiently sawing away until the horn drops off and you can claim it as a true hunting trophy and put it up for sale. Yuch!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 21st, 2012 at 3:13 am and is filed under Business, Finance, Money, Personal / Internet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Online Sales of Rhino Horn to be Investigated

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