Have a guess at how many rhinoceroses there are left on the planet. How many leopards? How many lions? Go on, have a guess.
I guessed 100,000, 100,000 again and two million for lions. Then I looked up the numbers on the internet and I was shocked. For all five species of rhino, there are in total around 30,000 individuals (but only 61 - 63 examples of the Javan rhino and 100 of the Sumatran rhino). The most common species, the white rhino, has about 20,000 individuals. There used to be millions of these things, wandering around, eating the greenery.1
As the ‘Save the Rhino’ charity says, ‘The first period of decline was caused by wholesale Colonial-era hunting and habitat loss as land was increasingly turned to agriculture and urban development. However, large-scale poaching of the now critically-endangered black rhino resulted in a dramatic 96% decline from c. 70,000 individuals in 1970 to just 2410 in 1995,’ although numbers have now risen to around 5000 individuals through hard conservation efforts.
How many leopards? Estimates vary, from 30,000 upwards, but there are certainly not as many as there used to be. According to Panthera2, ‘panthers are now extinct in six countries and possibly extinct in six additional countries where they formerly roamed and have vanished from at least 49% of their historic range in Africa and 84% of their historic range in Eurasia. The species is threatened by illegal killing for their skins and other body parts used for ceremonial regalia, conflict with local people, bushmeat poaching and poorly managed trophy hunting.’
As for the number of lions, I was way out: one source3 suggests fewer than 40,000 lions now live in the wild, fewer than the number of people who live in the little town where I work: ‘Lions have disappeared from 90% of their historic range due to habitat loss, hunting and poaching, ...killings by livestock owners, loss of prey and other factors. Just over a century ago, there were more than 200,000 wild lions living in Africa. Today, there are only about 20,000; lions are extinct in 26 African countries.’
It seems that whenever humans and the ‘megafauna’ come into contact, there is only one ‘winner’ in the long term. Generally, the megafauna (the big beasts) gets wiped out. There used to be sabretooth tigers, woolly mammoths, woolly rhinos, giant beavers and giant armadillos, but we, as a species, killed them all.4
Of course, in the beginnings of our world-wide killing spree, we did it for meat, to eradicate competitors and to reduce risk of attack. However, for the last 6000 years or so, we have had access to technology and knowledge, that have allowed us to farm using agriculture and domesticated animal husbandry. The majority of the human race does not need to kill the megafauna for meat.
Instead, many of these animals are now being killed by poachers for the body-parts of the animals. I needn’t list the various alleged benefits of ingesting rhino horn, bear testicles, musk deer glands, or tiger or elephant parts. The use of body parts harvested from primates - our closest cousins in the animal kingdom - for ‘medicinal’ or ‘magical’ purposes is a continuing threat to the survival of these species.5 ‘Traditional Chinese Medicine’ is a major user of animal body parts, not just as ‘curatives’ but also as enhancers (such as for improving memory, circulation or libido)6. The suggestion that the ‘medicines’ become more effective as the animals in question become rarer (and more expensive), surely spells doom for them all.
We might laugh at the notion that eating a bear’s penis might endow us with super-human powers, but I suspect that we are all a little more susceptible to ‘magic thinking’ than we might like to admit. If you’ve ever ‘knocked on wood’ in the hope that something will happen (as I regularly do myself), or grasped a rabbit’s foot (yes, really) for good luck, then you are thinking magically. In fact, we may as well just stop doing these things for all the difference that they actually make in the world. As for taking powdered rhino horn as an aphrodisiac? Well, rhino horn is composed of keratin, the same stuff found in hair and in animal hooves. There’s another handy supply of keratin that we all have access to, so the next time you need some ‘aphrodisiac’ with the exact same composition as rhino horn, instead of killing a rhino and making a powder of its magnificent appendage, please just bite your finger nails.
1 https://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/rhino_population_figures
2 https://www.panthera.org/cat/leopard
3 https://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/animals/blogs/how-many-lions-are-left-in-the-wild
4 Lewis J. Bartlett, David R. Williams, Graham W. Prescott, Andrew Balmford, Rhys E. Green, Anders Eriksson, Paul J. Valdes, Joy S. Singarayer, Andrea Manica. Robustness despite uncertainty: regional climate data reveal the dominant role of humans in explaining global extinctions of Late Quaternary megafauna. Ecography, 2015; DOI: 10.1111/ecog.01566
5 http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8589000/ 8589551.stm
6 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3021541/From-crocodile-jaws-bear-testicles-bizarre-animal-parts-sale-China-s-medicine-markets-endangered-species-healing-qualities-believed-have.html
