Counter Poaching Efforts

[Sprocky]

Lets see what comes of this initiative in our beloved country.

[Flutterby]

News 24
18 June 2012, 20:19
Ian Martin


What has the plight of the rhinoceros got to do with Jean Baudrillard? You may well ask. The famous French philosopher, who died in 2007, is possibly best known for coming up with an idea so bizarre, it makes you wonder what he was smoking besides Gauloises. He called this concept the simulacrum, and it’s so weird, there aren’t many people who can get their heads around it. Let me try and simplify the thing and put it in a nutshell.

The simulacrum is not just an imitation of reality, it becomes reality itself, and the original reality dwindles into the background and becomes meaningless, and people then relate to the simulacrum and not to reality. See what I mean?

Now, just the other morning, me and my buddies were playing pool over at the Sea View. We were discussing the price of rhino horn.

“If you had a pet rhino,” I said, “would you cut its horn off and sell it?”
“For sure,” said Cupcake, straightening up after having sunk his white. “You know what a kilogram of rhino horn fetches nowadays?”
“Same price as cocaine,” said the other guy.
“Which is?” I said, not knowing the price of cocaine.
“Around $50 000 a kilo.”
“That’s like R350 000! Bring me the chain saw.”
“Except you don’t own a chain saw,” said Cupcake.
“And where’s your pet rhino?” asked the other guy, squinting down his cue and dreaming of a 3-in-one ricochet.
“I suppose it’s all about supply and demand,” I said. “All those Orientals wanting a scarce commodity. The fewer the rhino, the more they’ll pay for the horns.”
“Basic economics,” said Cupcake.
The other guy struck his white one helluva shot, which resulted in just about every other ball on the table being displaced but not one of them ended up in a pocket.
“Basic stupidity,” I said. “These Orientals are paying 350 grand for a kilo of powdered keratin – the same stuff as your fingernails are made of.”
“So? It’s not the intrinsic value that counts. It’s the perceived value, my mate.”
“Just another simulacrum,” said the other guy.

“Yeah, like that stupid watch of yours,” said Cupcake, pointing to the other guy’s imitation gold Ro-lex . “Does that piece of rubbish even work?”
“Of course it works. But it loses like two days in four hours. Doesn’t worry me, though. I don’t wear a watch to tell the time. Who needs a watch when you got a cell phone? Everybody’s got a cell phone.”
“So why wear the thing?”
“Image, man, image,” said the other guy. “It throws people into a state of mental confusion. They can’t work out if it’s genuine or not; there’s so much fake stuff about, you never can be sure of anything.”
“It’s not a watch you’re wearing,” I said. “It’s a signifier of something else. Some kind of hyper reality.”
“Yah, that’s how it works for me. People think it’s probably a fake, but maybe it’s not. Maybe I stole it, and that makes me kind of dangerous. Or maybe this Ro-lex is the genuine 50 thousand buck thing, and I’ve got millions in the bank, even though I look like a loser, And that makes me super cool, jy weet? Anyway, this watch, which I bought for a hundred buckaroos at a flea market, makes people treat me with more respect than if I wore some nondescript watch, or no watch at all.”
“Yes,” said Cupcake. “But this hyper reality stuff, this simulacrum, is no good for our rhino population.”
“That’s for sure,” I said. “As long as the Chinese believe in the efficacy of the simulacrum, the demand will far outweigh the supply. We can say goodbye to the rhino.”

“Not so fast,” said the other guy. “We must turn the simulacrum to our advantage, the way I’ve made this stupid watch replace the reality of a genuine Ro-lex with something that is not an imitation of a Ro-lex watch, but an imitation of the Ro-lex brand. The watch itself is no longer of any consequence. We can do the same thing with the rhino – and make some money at the same time.”
“Is this your crazy thought for the day?” I said.
“What we do is this,” said the other guy. “We make ourselves a rhino horn mould. Then we get a whole lot of ground up cattle horn from the abattoir, and a good modern binding agent that sets really hard, and then we go into production churning out hundreds of imitation rhino horns.”
“Aha!” said Cupcake. “I think I know where you’re going with this little brainwave of yours. We make a quick fortune without having to work too hard, and then we flood the market with our imitation horns.”
“That’s it,” said the other guy. “You got the picture just like that.” And he snapped his fingers in the air. “At a critical point the market will collapse and rhino horn, genuine or fake, will acquire junk status.”
“Brilliant!” I said. “Not only will we have made a pile of lovely boodle and saved the rhino from extinction, but we’ll have exploded the simulacrum. “Those people in Viet Nam and China will have to find some other worthless commodity to which they can attach the pseudo magical properties they now attribute to rhino horn.”
“It seems,” said Cupcake, “that the human brain is becoming less and less capable of dealing with reality in its raw condition. But hey, we’re supposed to be playing pool! Whose turn is it?”

[Flutterby]

The movie Rhinos under Threat was produced by UNTV in collaboration with the CITES Secretariat in an effort to raise public awareness of the current crisis faced by rhinoceros through illegal killing and international trade in rhino horn. The movie was be first shown on 18 June 2012 in Rio de Janeiro on the occasion of the Rio+20 Conference.

[Lisbeth]

A very well done video! Only one thing is missing: They do not emphasize enough that the rhino horn has no healing powers at all, but then again I do not think that the video is intended for the end consumer

[mposthumus]

Excellent video but so, so sad

[Flutterby]

Prince William Speaks Up for Rhinos

Rhinos have a royal friend in Prince William, who told BBC News that those who participate in the illegal rhino horn trade are “extremely ignorant, selfish, and utterly wrong”.

Prince William is lending his support to a conservation initiative that has sent three captive-born black rhinos from Kent to Tanzania.

The three rhinos are now on African soil and surrounded by armed guards 24/7.

In the interview, Prince William fed a female black rhino named Zawadi (who has since arrived safely in Tanzania), and voiced his concern about the decimation of rhino and elephant populations.

View Video

[Sprocky]

2012-06-21 22:26

Johannesburg - Flies buzz around a hulking pile of flesh and muscle that lies rotting in the Kruger National Park with its eyes gouged out and scimitar-like horns hacked off in the opening scenes of a shocking new documentary on rhino poaching.

A series of still-photos of other gruesome kills flash across the screen in Rhino under threat, a deeply disturbing 28-minute film available on video-sharing website YouTube that has been made to drive home the horror of a rhino poaching crisis which has reached alarming levels.

Made by UNTV and the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the film can be seen on YouTube.

It debuted on Monday at the Rio +20 global environment conference in Rio de Janeiro.

South Africa, home to close to the vast majority of the planet's rhino, is the epicentre of the unfolding tragedy.

According to the latest data from the department of environmental affairs, as of 15 June 245 rhino have been poached in the country so far in 2012. At this rate the carnage will almost certainly exceed the 448 slain last year.

A decade ago only a handful were being taken.

Elephant and rhino poaching is surging, conservationists say, an illegal part of Asia's scramble for African resources, driven by the growing purchasing power of newly affluent Asians.

Heart-rending

Rhino horn has long been used in traditional medicines in China and Vietnam and the film quotes a doctor at Hanoi's biggest hospital who sings its praises.

According to the film, rhino horns have also been stolen from museums and private collections in more than 15 countries.

It says Vietnam's last wild Javan rhino was poached last year and the slaughter in Africa is relentless.



"It's heart-rending," Ted Reilly, the head of Big Game Parks in Swaziland, says in the film. The kingdom lost its first rhino to poachers in two decades last year.

"You will find a rhino cow with a baby calf. The mother goes down and that calf usually will defend the mother. It won't allow the poachers to get anywhere near it. And they end up having to shoot it too," Reilly says.

The horn and half the face is then cut off with a chainsaw and Reilly says they have had instances where rhinos who had been drugged then wake up and stagger around in this state.

"How do you deal with people like that?," he asks.

For the game wardens on the front lines, feelings toward them can certainly harden.

"I suppose the brutality of it is being lost on me at the moment. And to survive the emotional side of it one gets hardened. It's like seeing dead poachers now. I've seen enough this year not to worry about them anymore," says one Kruger Park ranger.

- Reuters

[JoeKing]

Director: Diony Kempen
Cast: Ronnie Nyakele, Justin Strydom, Carmel Fisher
When a troubled ex-convict drops out of society and heads for the bush to find solace with nature, he teams up with a renegade poacher and an independent eco-warrior woman to bring a pair of corrupt game farm owners and the head of a rhino killing syndicate to justice. In South Africa, a rhino is killed every 24 hours. This film is a response to this crisis but it is also a thrilling entertainment that will make audiences think about the genocide of one of Africa’s greatest species. http://www.nationalartsfestival.co.za/show/snare/





selected cinemas September 2012

[JoeKing]

Sorry sprocket, it doesn't relate to your thread but, when i saw film in the headline i had to add this

[Flutterby]

This is the video referred to in Sprocky's post:

View Video