Snake oil threat to the world's rhinos

Selling rhino horn as a cancer cure

March 2013. As the rhino poaching crisis, hits new troughs, some snake oil salesmen from South Africa want to enrich themselves by selling 'snake oil' to the Vietnamese. In this case, the snake oil comes in the form of rhino horn, which some rhino farmers in South Africa want to sell legally to Vietnamese businessmen who will sell it in Vietnam as a cure all for cancer.

A rhino calf that was severely slashed with a panga -

 Legalising rhino horn sales won't prevent this happening, 

and may well have the opposite effect. 

Photo courtesy of Endangered Wildlife Trust

Aside from the rights and wrongs for the rhinos of making them into a commodity, the ethics of selling, at vast expense, rhino horn, which is made of keratin, the same as your hair and mine, to ignorant and misguided people who believe it will cure them of cancer and various other ills, is as disgusting as any peddling fake drugs to any gullible member any public.

What are the penalties for pharmaceutical fraud in South Africa? 

If a Vietnamese citizen was selling snake oil in South Africa for hundreds of thousands of dollars a go, and promising a cure for cancer et al, there would be a vast outcry and no doubt he would be jailed for many a year, and quite rightly so. So why oh why would it be ok for South Africa to sell rhino horn to Vietnamese as a cure?

South Africa's debate on ‘rhino-conomics' is preparing the ground for legal sale of horn, warns wildlife charity

South Africa is preparing to launch a campaign to legalise the rhino horn trade, warns Care for the Wild, following a debate on the merits of ‘rhino-conomics' at the CITES conference in Bangkok.

Continued:  http://www.wildlifeextra.com/go/news/rhino-horn-sell.html