Rhino horns are now being advertised illegally online, amid unprecedented poaching levels and soaring black market prices paid for them by international criminal syndicates.
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.
“We got rhino horn for sale. We can ship the horns at 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, The Mercury 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.
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 US$3 350 (about R26 000) a kilogram.
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/kg, while the price paid in Vietnam for shaved and powdered rhino horn has reached between $20 000/kg and $30 000/kg.
Kwazula said the horns were from rhinos that were culled in 1955 and that they were well preserved.
A recent report to the standing committee of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species noted that antique horns were frequently treated with arsenic by taxidermists.
A spokesman for the international wildlife trade monitoring group Traffic said last night that the reported sale of rhino horn on the internet would be investigated.
However, he cautioned that the majority of adverts offering endangered wildlife goods were scams. - The Mercury