Rhinos and cancer

My last post talked about Thailand and ivory but, as I said, we were also in Bangkok to meet our WWF Viet Nam colleagues.

In Viet Nam the current issue is rhinos. Viet Nam lost its last indigenous rhino in 2010 - the last of a separate subspecies of the Javan rhino, found in Cat Tien National Park (now there are less than 50 Javan rhinos left in the world, in a tiny population on Java itself). While the last specimen was lost to poachers, the primary reason for the extinction - over the period since the remnant population was discovered in 1988 - was loss of habitat. Unauthorised clearance, followed by cashew plantations, chipped away at the area occupied by the small population to the point that the poacher's gun was just the coup de grace.

Tragic as this loss is, it seems to have galvanised conservationists in Viet Nam. With the extinction - or near extinction - of several other species in that country (including tigers) they have a lot on their plate. However, Viet Nam is on the centre of the International stage when it comes to rhino conservation because it is the main destination for rhino horn poached from South Africa.

South Africa was long a success story when it came to rhinos. At one point the Southern White Rhino was thought to be extinct, until a population of 100m individuals was discovered in 1895. Today the population numbers over 20,000 and the subspecies has been reintroduced to neighbouring countries. That success is now threatened.

Of course, it happened at a time in South Africa's history that is not one to be proud of - to put it mildly. So one might expect that the current situation is in part a result of the post-apartheid regime. However, the preliminary evidence gives indications that wealthy white syndicates are - at least in part - the drivers behind the current poaching crisis. Whatever the truth in this, the statistics are grim. In 2007, 13 rhinos were poached in South Africa - a negligible figure against the size of the population. That rose to 83 in 2008 and 122 in 2009. At that time, Zimbabwe was the main concern when it came to poaching (it has subsided there subsequently, largely because the remaining herds are "too hard to get"). In 2010, the figure in South Africa shot up to 333, rising to 448 in 2011.Most of this poaching is not happening in privately owned herds but in the large flagship rhino herd in Kruger National Park.

The traditional destination for rhino horn was China but that country has banned trade in rhino horn since 1993 and, while there are debates about how strictly the ban is enforced, it would be hard to account for the scale of the poaching in terms of the potential Chinese market. In fact, the recent surge in poaching arises from rumours in Viet Nam that it cures cancer - a claim that was never made for it in either traditional Chinese or Vietnamese medicine. Unfortunately, the end result is that the horn is on sale openly in the cities. Even though the trade is illegal, no-one has been arrested. In fact, Government officials are now taking it as a designer drug, a cure for hangovers after late night banquets.

As far as the cancer myth goes, we heard that at least some of the high profile people - such as wives of high Party officials - who had taken the horn as a cancer treatment had died anyway. There were also heartrending anecdotes of families selling everything they had to buy rhino horn for an ailing relative and then spending hours every day grinding it down, only to have the victim die in the end. The problem is that cancer is one disease that drives its sufferers - and their loved ones - to try any remedy, even whentheir brain tells them there is no reason to believe it will work.

This was poignantly illustrated when, in the midst of our discussions, one of the staff in our office offered her personal experience. Her father has cancer and she told us that she had been under pressure from family members - including her husband - to try rhino horn as a remedy. The implication was that a good daughter would try anything that had a chance - however remote - of curing her father. And this is the problem. The science tells us that there is no evidence that it cures cancer but when it's you or your relative that is the patient, reason goes out the window and you are prepared to try anything. In fact, she had to say to her husband "Please don't ask me again because if you do I'll say yes."

So the end consumers aren't the villains. No, the villains are those who are exploiting vulnerable people, and contributing to the loss of an iconic animal in the process.

Elephants and tourists

I haven't posted here for over two weeks as I have been travelling in Asia, helping my indefatigable colleagues, Lis McLellan and Wendy Elliott (assisted also by other colleagues from our office) to lay the groundwork for a campaign that WWF will (hopefully) launch this summer on illegal international wildlife trade.

Our first stop was Thailand, where we had assembled staff from our offices in that country and in Viet Nam (I prefer the two-word spelling). The issue with Thailand itself is ivory. Thanks to a legislative loophole that has been identified a number of years ago - but not yet fixed - it is legal to sell ivory from domestic elephants. Fair enough, you might say, except that there is no paperwork or chain of custody to distinguish such ivory from ivory of wild elephants, meaning that there's a no-brainer means available for laundering illegally obtained ivory. This illegal ivory does not come from Asian elephants (because the supply there is limited, since the females don't bear tusks and selective hunting in the past favours males that inherit only small tusks). Instead, it comes from Africa, and mostly from Central Africa at that. Both the export from Central Africa and the import to Thailand is entirely illegal but the ivory is rarely stopped on the way out. Once it reaches Thailand, if it gets past customs (or leaks subsequently from Government warehouses) it is "home free" on the streets. There is a cottage industry of carvers who make trinkets, mostly for the tourist market. It is illegal to buy this ivory and take it home but tourists are not necessarily made aware of this. Indeed, they must succeed as often as not in getting it home or the market would have dried up.

In exploring this issue with our Thai colleagues in WWF, I was struck - as always - by the impulsive enthusiasm of Thai people. They just needed the spur of a meeting like this and they were up in arms, ready to engage the public in a bid to rectify this situation.

However, the situation is urgent. Central Africa's elephants are bleeding. While we were on our trip, news was breaking of militia who had encroached into Camerooners from Chad and Sudan, killing over 200 elephants. The elephant populations in the region are in freefall (as are the hippos - and the region has already lost all its rhinos).

On a number of levels

There is one incident in that gloriously irreverent TV satire, The Thick of It, when Jamie, who is just as foul-mouthed as his better-known colleague, fellow-Scot Malcolm Tucker, says to a female civil servant: 

"...we're having here is a secret conversation and I'm hoping that this time you can keep the fucking secret, because normally you're about as secure as a hymen in a south London comprehensive!"

To which she replies:

"Yep, well done. That's offensive on a number of levels in a very concise way." 

Likewise, a few weeks ago, right-wing Irish journalist Ruth Dudley-Edwards (a columnist with the Irish Sunday Independent) made a comment that was offensive on a number of levels when she complained of Republican candidates like Herman Cain and Rick Perry being mocked by an "urban elite".

At one level, this is offensive, to rural Americans because it implies that they are just to naive - or even too stupid - to remark on the gaffs by these and other gaff-prone Republican candidates. It the implication is that urban people are too decent and wholesome to make fun of the crass stupidity exhibited by these candidates while urban people are snide and malicious, then that is both patronising and offensive at the same time.

We see this thread of thought taken a bit further by Dudley-Edwards' less intellectually able colleague Eilis O'Hanlon, who argued a couple of weeks later that Obama was so unpopular that he would be unelectable this November, were it not for the way in which "the media" denigrate his potential opponents.In doing so, of course, she ignores the hate-filled invective vomited out by Fox News, the most popular news network in the USA, against not only Obabma but any vaguely liberal point of view - even going so far as to implicate the Muppets in a left-wing conspiracy.

What is most offensive, though, about the views of both columnists is that they make excuses for anti-intellectualism. They almost imply that it is a sin to be clever, discerning, sceptical or analytical if that leads to dismissal of Presidential candidates who are both nasty and crass. As Isaac Asimov put it, “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”

One of the more pathetic arguments advanced by supporters of such poltroons as Cain and Perry (and, indeed, Gingrich) is that they don't need to be acutely intellectual because they will have access to advice from smart people (this was also George W Bush's defence). In fact, what tends to happen is that these men are often  manipulated by the smart people they hire to supposedly advise them. Moreover, if this really is the case, why not vote for the organ-grinder, rather than the monkey?

Thankfully, at least Cain and Perry are out of the race now. And the Irish Times had an unintentionally amusing by-line on the latter's withdrawal:

Perry quits US Presidential Race: Texas Governor has suspended his campaign and offered his back to Newt Gingrich

Now, do I qualify as a member of the urban elite too? Perhaps not if I live in a town with a population of less than 20,000