A STUDY by the World Wide Fund for Nature-SA has revealed the typical user of products containing rhinoceros horn and, as a result of driving this market, a major contributor to the ongoing slaughter of the animals in our game parks. 

The archetypal "Mr L", according to news reports, is a 48-year-old property developer in Vietnam, married with adult children, who wants to be seen as a leader and believes using rhino horn is a symbol of wealth and power. He and his nobbish, upper income compatriots are the biggest drivers of the current poaching crisis.

It should perhaps then not be surprising that Mr L is a property developer. These people are bad news when it comes to the wilderness, which they regard as places in which to dump yet more Tuscan-styled cluster monstrosities. 

I don't know quite what it is with Boere Toskaans - perhaps the sheer vulgarity of it all stirs us deeply in the trousers - but we just can't live, it seems, without living in a pile preposterously named after a quick flip through the index of an old Fodor's. How long, I wonder, before there's nothing left in the travel guides, and we're putting down a deposit on some two-bedroomed rubbish in a development named after something from Jamie Oliver's Italian cookbook?

None of this, of course, is of any use to the rhino. Frankly, it doesn't look good for them, does it? We're at a point now when their population will soon start to decline; that is, the rate at which these animals are killed will outstrip the rate at which they're able to breed in the wild. 

In the eight years from 2000 to 2007, poachers killed 120 rhino - an average of 15 a year. Then came the current crisis. In 2008, 83 animals were killed. The next year, it was 122; in 2010, 333; in 2011, 448; and last year, 668. So far this year 635 animals have been killed. Figures released by the SA National Wildlife Crime Reaction Unit and the Department of Environmental Affairs show that, since 2010, poaching has increased dramatically from October to December each year. The next three months, then, could be catastrophic for rhino conservation.

Obviously the disappearance and scarcity of rhino in other parts of the world, particularly Asia, has led to the spike in local poaching. What is particularly distressing, though, is that international conservation efforts have come to nothing. 

It's been said that, unless we can "educate" people like Mr L, our rhino are doomed. But teach them what? At first we presumed that these Asians believed powdered horn had medicinal properties, that it gave them whopping erections, it cured cancer, it could be used to detect poisons, it built up immune systems, and so on. And so we set out to tell them that this was all nonsense, that you'd get as much good out a horn as sucking a cow's hoof. 

All to no avail. It's clearly evident that "medicine" or "education" has nothing to do with it. It's a "cultural" matter. For Mr L and all the other archetypes the WWF-SA has identified - the yuppie who buys horn for his boss to secure a promotion, or the wealthy dowager who showers her family members with the stuff - our rhino are little more than collateral damage in the very important business of bettering your peers.

Frankly, I'm convinced that all the Mr Ls out there are only too well aware of the consequences of their actions. They're not stupid. That, I believe, is the big mistake conservationists make, they believe they're up against "superstition" and "tradition", when in fact it's probably nothing more than greed and spite.

So, there goes our wildlife heritage - just to drive a property developer's pressing need to sling up a massively profitable eyesore in some erstwhile pristine neck of the woods north of Ho Chi Minh City or Saigon.

But on to other matters. This national heritage weekend sees much in the way of hop, skip and jumping at the 10th annual National Indigenous Games Festival in Pretoria. There are (it says here) nine "codes": jukskei, morabaraba, diketo, dibeke, kgati, ncuva, lintonga,drie stokkies and kho-kho. In other words, a riot of throwing stuff, playing weird forms of backgammon, running and jumping around aimlessly, and fiddling with bits of rope. 

It's not cricket, you could say. Or football. Or rugby . . . but never mind. If heritage is defined as that part of our world we'd want to pass on to future generations, then perhaps this sort of twee folksiness is all we'd have after the game has gone.

This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.

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