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Panda poaching reaches crisis levels as growing demand
for dried panda nose spreads in Africa / 1 April 2015 / Durban
Beijing – A 2-month old panda cub is the latest victim of increasingly ruthless poachers in Asia. The female cub was slashed 18 times across the face with machetes or axes earlier this week as poachers, believed to be cutting off her mother’s nose after killing her, tried to chase the cub away. The cub was later found near her mother’s carcass, barely alive, by rangers in Sichuan's Guoliang Reserve. Named Guanyin, she is now recovering at a panda rehabilitation centre.
More than 1 200 giant pandas were killed for their noses in 2014 – an average of more than 2 every day. 90% of the killings occurred in China, which has the last remaining pandas in the wild, in areas of mountain forest in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu. 10 pandas were also poached in zoos in China and Vietnam.
International crime experts say that poaching has spiked in recent months because panda nose dealers are approaching wealthy African buyers from Lagos to Durban, via the internet and social media. The dealers are perpetuating a new myth that panda nose – when dried, cut up and eaten – cures a range of ailments from hangovers to poor sexual performance, or even cancer.
Dealers are targeting the sick and elderly with the cancer fallacy in particular, although most buyers of panda nose appear to be upwardly mobile South African socialites, who see panda nose as an aphrodisiac and status symbol. Powdered panda bones are generating a smaller, yet fast-growing, trade in both South Africa and Botswana.
While authorities have quickly stepped up efforts to combat poaching on the ground, with heavily armed patrols, helicopters and drones patrolling the forested mountains, many conservationists argue that Southern African states, particularly South Africa, where the largest black market for panda nose has arisen, must do more to dispel the widely-held misconceptions about panda nose now fuelling black market trade in the back alleys and boardrooms of South Africa’s biggest cities.
Two NGOs said this week that governments in Asia and Southern Africa need to work together, not just to fight the poachers, but to mount sustained educational initiatives in Africa, to quash the medical fallacies around dried panda nose.
As wild giant panda numbers keep dropping to around 1 600 today, the prospect of this gentle species becoming extinct and entering the annals of Asian myth and legend - as the ironic result of an African myth - seems ever more credible.
Please note: The above is a wholly fictional ‘news story’, which I wrote in my personal capacity as a concerned South African. It's actually a direct translation of several news reports on rhino poaching in South Africa, in which rhinos are swapped with pandas and Africa for Asia.
Why? Because such an exercise holds a mirror up to a very real and heartbreaking story: the decimation of the rhino population in Southern Africa, due to the demand for horn in Asia (currently, most rhino horns leave Africa for China and Vietnam). Last year more rhinos were poached in SA than in any previous year.
The 'injured panda cub'? In reality, a 2-month old rhino calf attacked in January 2013 http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2013/01/12/poachers-hack-baby-rhino-with-axe-machete. Ever since I first read that story, the intensity of the rhino poaching tragedy really hit me. Actual Endangered status of Giant Pandas aside, I wrote this alternate-world piece about poaching, to generate debate and raise some tough questions:
How would people in Asia feel, were the rhino poaching epidemic in reverse? If many Africans believed panda noses had medicinal benefits? Do Africa’s endangered rhinos carry as much emotional weight in Asia, as Asia’s endangered and precious panda does?
It's not only Asian buyers who are to blame - “unscrupulous wildlife industry professionals in South Africa have turned to supplying traffickers with rhino horn, often via trophy hunting loopholes” (www.savingrhinos.org). Yet ultimately it is the end of the supply chain that needs addressing. The centuries-old belief that rhino horn has medical benefits for human beings must be shattered in Asia.
Please will the governments and the good people of Asia do all they can to dispel myths and quash the demand for powdered rhino horn. Because as long as there is demand in Asia, there will be poaching in Southern Africa - until eventually, no more rhinos.
The idea of switching rhino poaching for ‘panda poaching’ stems directly from work created by a contemporary, Torsten Fehsenfeld, with permission. His original poaching awareness campaign can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4tFgzffhxc.
Gareth Pike
March 2015
More on the 2014 rhino poaching death toll: http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2015/01/22/1215-rhinos-poached-in-sa-in-2014-official-calls-for-military-intervention
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