To Raise Money For Endangered Black Rhinos, Texas Hunting Group Will Sacrifice One To The Highest Bidder
ByThe Dallas Safari Club will help protect the endangered black rhino in Africa by sacrificing one to the highest bidder, Aljazeera reported.
The organization announced Friday its plans to auction off one permit allowing the winner to hunt a single black rhino in Namibia. The goal is to raise a million dollars, or $250,000 minimum.
Working with the Namibian government and its national parks, the Dallas Safari Club claimed one of only five rhinos sanctioned for legal killing in the region. Namibian rhinos are part of a South African herd of 1,795 animals, Aljazeera reported. Only around 4,800 exist in the world, according to The World Wildlife Fund.
Ben Carter, executive director of the Dallas Safari Club, insists the event is strictly about the conservation of the Rhino, which are hunted daily by poachers, according to Al Jazeera's Jonah Hull.
"Poachers come by helicopter and dart a rhino from the air with a powerful tranquilizer, a drug three thousand times more powerful than morphine," Hull reported. "As (a rhino) succumbs to deep sedation, they take a chainsaw to her face. The machine's sharp teeth tear into her skull, removing her nasal cavities, exposing parts of her brain." (The horn) will be sold to a middle man for a small fortune."
Rhino parts control an especially lucrative market in Asia, where buyers believe in their special healing powers, including the ability to cure cancer, according to Al Jazeera.
Whoever wins the bidding will be screened intensely. So will the Rhinos. Tim Van Norman, chief of the branch of permits at the FWS, pointed out that the killing of male rhinos past their reproductive prime might actually spur the population.
"Black rhinos are very territorial so you will have an older male that is keeping younger males from reproducing," he said. "By removing these older males from the population, you get an increase in the production of calves. Younger males are able to impregnate the females that are in that area so you get more offspring than from some of these older males."
Carter defended the process by claiming the loss of only a few rhinos wouldn't have significant impacts on the herd.
"Black rhinos tend to have a fairly high mortality rate," he told the Dallas Observer. "Generally speaking, out of a population of 2,000, harvesting three rhinos over a couple or three years has no impact on the health of the rhino herd at all."
Some animal rights groups are against the auction, which also took place in 2009 and raised $175,000 for the Namibian Game Products Trust Fund.
Wayne Pacelle, president of the Human Society of the United States, called the auction "distrubing."
"The world is seeing a concerted effort to preserve the very few black rhinos and other rhinos who are dodging poachers' bullets and habitat destruction," Pacelle said."The last thing they need are wealthy elites from foreign lands coming in to kill them for their heads."
"Shooting a black rhino in the wild is about as difficult as shooting a parked car," he said. "If these are multimillionaires and they want to help rhinos, they can give their money to help rhinos. They don't need to accompany their cash transfer with a high caliber bullet," he said.
The auction will take place at the Dallas Safari Club's annual convention from Jan. 9 to Jan 12 of next year, according to Al Jazeera.