Post by account_disabled on Feb 27, 2024 7:51:14 GMT
The sale of rhino horn is now legal in South Africa, following the revocation of the country's High Court of the temporary ban on trade in this coveted product issued by the Government in 2009. "The moratorium on the sale of rhino horn on the South African market is suspended with this verdict," announced Judge Francis Legodi in the Pretoria court. The decision settles, at least provisionally, several years of debate between opponents and supporters of legalization. The court's decision was announced months before the Cites (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) congress, which will be held in Johannesburg and could lift the global ban on the horn trade. “Lifting the moratorium is extremely dangerous,” said the director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) in South Africa, Jason Bell.
It sets an unnecessary precedent because it allows internal trade in horns, although their departure from the country is not authorized," he added. "If the international moratorium is lifted, history has shown that poaching and illegal trade will grow spectacularly," he highlighted. For Bell, the rhino population will disappear in Portugal WhatsApp Number two or three years if Chinese consumption remains at the current level. With his verdict, Legodi agrees with the owners of private reserves John Hume and Johan Kruger, who appealed to court against the ban on the sale of rhino horns. «What disastrous consequences could the immediate lifting of the ban have? "I don't see any," the judge concluded in his ruling. John Hume, the world's largest private owner of rhinos, told the court that he cannot afford to keep the animals without selling the horns of some of them. After the lifting of the moratorium was announced, the Government stated that it planned to appeal the ruling.
For his part, Legodi considers it likely that the ban has contributed to increasing levels of poaching of these animals, whose horns are sold at prices higher than gold in Asian markets due to their supposed healing and aphrodisiac properties. The current trafficking fuels an underground market for traditional Asian medicine, especially in Vietnam and China, where curative properties are attributed to horn powder. The IFAW director for South Africa also described as implausible the arguments of those who say that legal trade would allow poaching to end. Poaching increases South African rhino farmers went to court in September to win the right to legally sell the animals' antlers, saying it would deal a blow to poaching.