Nearly 500 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa last year, an 11% increase compared to 2022, despite government efforts to protect the animal, authorities said on Tuesday.
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The country, home to most of the world's rhinos, is particularly vulnerable to poaching, fueled by demand from Asia, where its horn is used in traditional medicine for its supposed therapeutic effects.
According to the Ministry of Environment, 499 of these mammals were killed in 2023, most of them in state parks.
These numbers paint “a worrying picture,” according to the NGO Save the Rhino International, which is urgently mobilizing more resources against poachers. “There is no immediate solution, but with a rhino poaching every 17 hours in South Africa, we cannot afford to waste any more time,” said Jo Shaw, president of the NGO.
Most rhinos killed in 2023 were slaughtered in the eastern province of KwaZulu-Natal, where 307 animals were lost in Hluhluwe-Imfolozi Park alone, Africa's oldest reserve.
“These are the largest poaching losses recorded in this province,” said Environment Minister Barbara Creecy. “Multidisciplinary teams continue to work tirelessly to curb these pressures,” she added.
In recent years, South African authorities have increased security, particularly around the Kruger National Park (northeast), which is near Mozambique and is very popular with tourists and where the rhino population has fallen dramatically over the past 15 years to 10,000 to less than 3,000 people.
These efforts have led to a decline in the number of these animals killed by poachers in this park – 78 in 2023, or 37% less than the year before.
However, this also led to poachers turning to other regional or private reserves, such as that of Hluhluwe-Imfolozi.
Police arrested 49 suspected poachers in KwaZulu-Natal last year, Ms Creecy said. And in the country, 45 rhino horn poachers or traffickers have been convicted by the courts, she added.
Black market
Among them, a former park ranger was sentenced to 10 years in prison for killing a rhino and later claiming he was framed by the animal.
Since 2023, national parks have required new employees to take lie detector tests amid fears that some may be in cahoots with poachers.
Rhino horns are highly sought after on the black market, where their price by weight rivals that of gold or cocaine.
Last September, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) pointed out that the number of these animals in Africa had increased thanks to efforts to conserve the species.
The continent hosted nearly 23,300 individuals at the end of 2022, an increase of 5.2% from the previous year, according to the IUCN, which calls it the first “good news” for this animal in a decade.
According to a separate estimate by the International Rhino Foundation, about 15,000 of these large herbivores live in South Africa.
But for Jeff Cooke from the environmental NGO WWF, this “progress remains fragile as long as poaching continues to be rampant.” In particular, the number of animals killed in KwaZulu-Natal is of “significant concern”, he added.