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Zoo burns horns to highlight poaching
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A CZECH zoo burned around 60 kilograms of rhino horns yesterday, part of an international campaign designed to highlight the plight of a species being driven toward extinction by poachers.
Demand for rhino horn is high in parts of Asia, where it is an ingredient in traditional medicine and is also used as an aphrodisiac and as a status symbol for growing numbers of the newly wealthy.
The Czech Republic has become a major transit point for rhino horn trafficking in recent years. Last year, Czech authorities seized 24 white rhino horns worth an estimated US$5 million and charged 16 suspected members of an international ring smuggling the prized material to Asia.
The Dvur Kralove zoo, some 150km northeast of Prague, organized the burning on the eve of World Rhino Day on September 22.
The international event was first announced in 2010 in South Africa, home to most of Africa’s surviving rhinos.
The demand for rhino horns shot up around that time after rumors that a Vietnamese minister’s relative had been cured of cancer by the horn.
There is no scientific evidence to support that claim.
“I think it sends a really good signal to the rest of Europe that this zoo and other zoos and other organizations joining today are just not interested in perpetuating the trade in rhino horns,” Tony Fitzjohn, founder of Wild Life Now and one of the leaders of the campaign to save rhinos, said.
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