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Subscribe to RSSIn museums across Europe, rhinoceros horns have been the target of thieves at least 30 times this year, as they go for $99,000 per kilo. Europe NBC's Jim Maceda reports.
LONDON — The demand for rhino horn in Asia, where some see its ground-up powder as an aphrodisiac and even cancer-curing medicine, has driven prices to nearly $50,000 a pound — and with it a new type of crime: thieves breaking into museums and auction houses to tear the horns off stuffed specimens.
At least 30 such thefts have taken place across Europe in the last year. The latest, on Tuesday at a hunting museum in Paris, saw thieves use a stun gas on two guards to facilitate the theft.
"The style of the offenses has taken us by surprise and the fact that they're still continuing today," Scotland Yard Detective Ian Lawson told NBC News after Tuesday's heist.
The heists are happening as poachers, motivated by the same profit, are slaughtering rhinos in Africa and Asia.
Bobby Yip / Reuters
Confiscated rhino horns, ivory chopsticks and ivory bracelets are shown in Hong Kong on Nov. 15.
Last month, Hong Kong confiscated 33 rhino horns, as well as 758 chopsticks and 127 bracelets made from elephant ivory, worth $2.2 million — its biggest seizure of smuggled endangered species products. The items were shipped from Cape Town, South Africa.
More South African rhinos were poached — 341 — in the first 10 months of 2011 than in all of 2010, which was a record poaching year with 333 animals lost. The International Rhino Federation project is for parks in South Africa and neighboring Zimbabwe, which also has seen increased poaching.
PhotoBlog: Rhinos get upside-down helicopter ride to safety
"We're losing animals like crazy," Michael Knight, head of park planning and development for South Africa's national parks department, recently told The Associated Press. "But the prosecutions are falling way behind."
Last month, experts declared that Africa's Western Black Rhino was "officially extinct." The Northern White Rhino of central Africa was declared "possibly extinct" in the wild and Vietnam's Javan Rhino "probably extinct."
About 100,000 Eastern Black Rhino roamed the continent at the beginning of the 20th century, before their numbers plummeted to just 1,500 in the 1960s. Today, about 4,500 exist thanks to intesive breeding and conservation efforts.
Sex workers used to poach rhinos
Animal activists, meanwhile, are trying to spread the word in Asia that rhino horn has no magical powers.
"It's exactly the same protein as found in our hair and in our fingernails, so you might was well chew your own off or somebody else's," Cathy Dean of Save the Rhino told NBC.
NBC's Jim Maceda, msnbc.com's Miguel Llanos and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Can't help but wonder what these scummy characters will do once the animals disappear from the planet forever. Where will they turn to feed their habit? Shouldn't there be a shoot to kill order(or at least a bounty on the hunters' heads) to try and protect these animals that are being slaughtered for what is essentially no reason at all?
Is Viagra available in China?
If it were marketed appropriately, along with clear information explaining that animal parts, whether it's rhino horns or tiger paws won't do anything for your "business", the demand would decrease, removing the profit motive for the smugglers, and the animals could be saved.
I hope the Chinese, as well as these activists, can accomplish this before it's too late.
Dali seemed to be obsessed with rhino horns...wonder if the myth had anythig to do with that.
Unfortunately, trying to convice the Chinese "Classicaly trained" Herbal Healer that Rhino Horn is useless and has no use in medicine and aphrodrodesiacs is like telling a Western Trained MD that Penicillin, Sulfa, and the smallpox vaccine aren't any good. Rich and powerfull Asian people will pay thousands, probably millions in the future, for it without blinking or considering it a crime (like drinking was during the prohibition era).
It's just too profitable for the poachers to stop.. they have no concience. In certain African countries where poaching is punishable by death, they tried to stop the poaching by drugging the animals and removing the horn without harming the animal. Thinking that would stop the poachers.. what happened.. all the Rhinos were still killed by the poachers, because they shot them to prevent them from tracking the same useless animal twice.
It's going to get so bad the criminals will come into American and European zoos (maybe even in broad daylight) to harvest the horns. I wish we could simply flood the chinese market with Viaga and Cealis to cull the Aphrodesiac angle.. maybe decrease the demand so much that we can give them a chance. But as to right now, the scientists need to collect as much DNA of them as possible because these people will not stop until the last horn is harvested and the only hope I see for them is possible cloning in the future from the DNA collected now.
It is too late to save display animals from the museums, which bear responsibility for the killing of their exhibits. They should be made to replace rhino horns with moulded plastic replicas, and sell the worthless originals to the loonies. Large sums of money would therefore become available to support, say, worthwhile charities and institutions, and buyers would waste their money on useless 'cures'. End of problem, at least for already murdered animals.