Zimbabwe is in an ongoing war against ivory poachers who are looking to harvest the horns of elephants and rhinos to sell for thousands of dollars. In Africa ivory roughly has the same value of gold and is believed to cure diseases such as cancer. Because of this, the demand of ivory has skyrocketed. Around fifty rhinos where killed in Zimbabwe last year for there horns, so wildlife conservationists set out to solve the problem. They plan on removing horns of the 100 adult rhinos that live in state game parks. Unfortunately it costs over one thousand dollars to sedate a rhino which is required when removing a horn. Horns also grow back each year so one would have to repeat this process each year in order to keep poaching down. This method has actually been proven to drastically reduce the number of rhinos poached all though it does have its flaws. A major flaw to this method is that the horns grow back fairly quickly. This makes this method relatively unsustainable as it is an expensive procedure. This method also does not fundamentally fix the problem Africa is having. Ivory is deeply routed in African societies and has become a source of income for many families. In order to truly fix this problem, one would have to introduce an alternate source of income for many of these families. One would also have to disprove the idea that ivory helps cure diseases. I have heard of ideas about a dye that can be injected into the ivory causing it to be unusable in ivory trade and it is relatively cheap. This is a fantastic idea although again, one would have to provide an alternate source of income to aid with the economic fall from a lack of ivory. http://thescienceexplorer.com/nature/zimbabwe-dehorning-its-rhinos-curb-poaching
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Alex Garcia-Environmentalist Archives
December 2016
Categories |