Dear Friends:
A very interesting article from today's New York Times. I believe it is
not only essential to protect our rhinos in Kaziranga but it is
necessary to
convince the users of the rhino's horns that it is not an aphrodisiac
or whatsoever the superstitious people believe it to be.Who are these
smugglers and consumers? The governments concerned ought to launch
campaigns to educate these people.
-bhuban
August 26, 2011
Rhino Horns Put Europe’s Museums on Thieves’ Must-Visit List
By SARAH LYALL
IPSWICH, England — The Ipswich Museum contains many alluring and
potentially theft-worthy items, including a spectacular 2,000-year-old
gold-leaf Egyptian death mask on loan from the British Museum and a
rare Hawaiian cape featuring feathers from the extinct o’o bird. But
when two thieves forced their way in after midnight on July 28, they
were seeking something else entirely.
Never mind that their target, a large rhinoceros horn, was still
attached to its owner, which had been standing blamelessly in the
museum since 1907.
“They just snapped it off,” said Bryony Rudkin, the Ipswich Borough
Council member in charge of culture. Grabbing a pair of additional
horns (and the rhino skull they belonged to) from a shelf nearby, the
thieves disappeared as quickly as they had come. “It was like ‘The Pink
Panther,’ ” Ms. Rudkin said. “In and out.”
It might have seemed like a bizarre, anomalous incident, the act of
someone with a perverse rhino fetish. But similar thefts, as many as 30
so far this year, have been reported in museums, galleries, antiques
dealerships, auction houses and homes across Europe as criminals try to
feed a growing demand in China and other Asian countries, where
medicine made from ground rhino horns is believed to act as an
aphrodisiac and to cure cancer and other diseases.
“I was quite surprised, I must admit,” said Ian Lawson, a detective in
the art and antiques unit at the Metropolitan Police Service in London,
describing his first realization that rhino-horn theft had become a
serious law-enforcement issue. “It’s taken a bit of time for everyone
to wake up to the fact that this is a cross-Europe offense, and that
they will attack anywhere that has a rhino horn.”
Mr. Lawson said that galleries and museums should be alert to what he
called “hostile reconnaissance” by would-be thieves. They were also
urged to keep images of their rhinos off their Web sites, to lock the
horns away, or, as the Natural History Museum in London has done, to
replace them with fake horns.
While horns have sold recently for upward of $200,000, the powder, Mr.
Lawson said, is reported to fetch £60,000 a kilo (about $45,000 a
pound) on the black market — more than gold, heroin or cocaine.
Stricter laws governing the sale of used rhino horns, the kind found
mounted on trophies or on rhinos that were long ago killed by big-game
hunters and stuffed by taxidermists, have also played a part. This year
Britain and other European countries tightened their regulations,
making it virtually impossible to export most rhino horns from the
European Union legally, thus increasing the value of purloined ones.
That crackdown has inadvertently threatened the efforts of conservation
groups to preserve wild rhinoceroses in Africa, as thieves — their
supply curtailed — have turned to poachers who hack off horns from live
animals, often leaving the rhinos to bleed to death, said Cathy Dean,
director of Save the Rhino, an advocacy group in Britain. So far this
year there have been 260 rhino deaths from poaching in South Africa
alone, compared with a total last year of 333, she added. The problem
was a major focus of the recent meeting in Geneva of the Convention on
International Trade in Endangered Species, whose members agreed to
share information and coordinate antipoaching efforts.
Rhino experts take great pains to rebut the claims that the horns have
medicinal value. Dr. Raj Amin, a researcher at the Zoological Society
of London, said recently on an episode of “Nature” on PBS that
ingesting rhino horns would be about as healthful as “chewing your own
nails.”
The law-enforcement organization Europol says the thefts are believed
to be the work of an organized gang of itinerant people known as Irish
travelers, who are also involved in drug smuggling, money laundering
and the less flamboyant crime of distributing fake power tools. Since
January the horn thieves have struck a Czech castle; natural history
museums in Belgium, Germany, France and Italy; and other targets in
Portugal and Sweden. In Britain rhino horns have also been stolen this
year from the Haslemere Educational Museum in Surrey and from Sworders
Fine Art Auctioneers in Essex.
In 2009 a rhino skull was stolen from the trophy-display wall of a
check-cashing business in Albany, N.Y. But in general the gang seems to
be focused on Europe, said Rhishja Larson, the founder of Saving
Rhinos, a group based in Petaluma, Calif.
In June the European Taxidermy Federation warned its members to be wary
of people asking about rhinos but failing to leave their names and
contact information. Such people, it said, “are probably not normal
businessmen.”
British taxidermists said they were loath to trade in rhino products
for fear of attracting criminal elements, anyway. “I wouldn’t touch the
stuff with a bargepole, literally,” Phil Leggett, a well-known
taxidermist, said.
Guy Schooling, Sworders’s managing director, said in an interview that
the company thought it had averted trouble when, before an auction in
February, it locked up its rhino-horn trophies and hired security
guards to patrol the premises. But the thieves were too smart: they
arrived after closing but before the guards, wrenching the only rhino
artifact not locked up — a mounted head — free from a plaque that had
been bolted to the wall.
“I would say, to anybody who’s got a rhino horn of any sort: ‘Do not
have it on display. Put a dummy up and booby-trap it,’ ” Mr. Schooling
said.
In Ipswich residents are feeling the loss of their rhino’s horn
particularly keenly. The rhino, acquired from the Natural History
Museum in 1907 in exchange for £16 and what documents from the time
call “a rare sort of pig,” is considered a town mascot.
A condolence book has been set up next to the rhino, a female
christened Rosie after a name-the-rhino competition years ago. “Poor
you, Rosie,” wrote a girl named Hannah. “Your horn was really pretty.”
Museum officials said they debated whether to leave Rosie hornless as a
reminder of what had happened, but decided instead to replace her
missing horn with an ersatz one.
“We will have a big sign saying, ‘This is a fake,’ ” said Ms. Rudkin,
the local council member. “ ‘This is not real. So don’t come and get
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