Melanie Gosling
Environment Writer
THE figure of Hong Kong martial arts actor Jackie Chan standing next to a rhino is being beamed from TV screens all over Asia in shopping malls, at airports and in people’s homes.
His message is simple: “When the Buying Stops, the Killing Can Too”.
Chan is one of a growing number of celebrities used by NGO WildAid in an effort to “end the illegal wildlife trade in our lifetimes” by strangling demand.
Chan explains in the 30-second advert that anyone who buys rhino horn is also paying for guns, bullets, pangas – and for the death of the rhino. “We are paying for the life of this beautiful creature,” Chan says.
He puts it to the audience that only when they stop buying horn, will the violence and death behind the horn cease.
WildAid CEO and founder Peter Knights is in South Africa this week to speak about misconceptions in the local media about the Asian side of rhino poaching.
“In Asia until recently, people genuinely did not understand the poaching problem. They’re told: ‘The rhino dies and we pick up the horn’. In China they had not heard about the rhino crisis,” Knights said at a briefing yesterday.
He set about changing that. While the law enforcement authorities and many NGOs focus efforts on anti-poaching and on breaking international criminal syndicates, Knights decided to focus on stamping out the market for wildlife products. A start was to tell those who bought wildlife products about the effect their purchases had on threatened species half a world away.
While rhino horn has been used by the traditional Chinese medicinal market for 2 000 years, the rocketing market in Vietnam is fairly recent.
In less than a decade rhino horn has become highly prized in Vietnam as a supposed cure for anything from cancer to hangovers. And because of the enormous price it commands, it is now coveted simply as a status symbol. Only the rich can afford it, but there are many aspiring to buy it.
“We realised we need to change hearts and minds, and behaviour will follow. What we’re trying to do at WildAid is to brand conservation as aspirational, and brand consumption as non-aspirational.”
Knights has used David Beckham, Prince William and basketball star Yao Ming in the advertising campaigns against the illegal wildlife trade, the fourth largest after drugs, weapons and human trafficking. Knights said the organisation gets about $200 million a year in free media support for the campaigns, with their message reaching about 1 billion people a week.
But it has been a battle.
For some years no funders were interested in financing demand reduction, they were all focused on saving the animals from being killed, or trying to bust the criminal syndicates involved in the illegal trafficking.
Knights says while this action is crucial, it is not enough to will the battle.
“Because if there is enough money to be made, another syndicate will spring up. We need to strangle the world market. We’re specialising in doing this, because no one else is doing it.”
Knights says the organisation invests funding in producing a quality product, not in buying advertising space.
“We ask for the space free. Having top celebrities means we get top space.”
He says surveys, after anti-wildlife trade media campaigns have been running for some time, show that attitudes do change: the belief in the medicinal qualities of rhino horn dropped from 58 to 44 percent.