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.