KRUGER NATIONAL PARK, South Africa: When Singapore customs officers investigated a suspicious cargo of furnishings fittings at Changi Airport final month, a pungent odor led them to something far more sinister.
Contained in the cargo from South Africa have been 20 rhino horns weighing 35.7kg and price round S$1.13 million (US$870,000), together with 150kg of different animal components together with bones, tooth and claws.
The Nov 8 seizure marked Singapore’s largest rhino horn haul so far, surpassing a 34.7kg cache intercepted in 2022. Each shipments adopted the identical 9,000km route from South Africa to Laos, a identified vacation spot for trafficked wildlife merchandise.
Wildlife specialists say Singapore has change into a transit hub in a smuggling pipeline that begins in South Africa’s rhinoceros-rich grasslands and terminates in Asian markets the place the horns – regardless of being composed merely of keratin, like human fingernails – command excessive costs as supposed drugs and standing symbols.
The buying and selling of rhino horns is prohibited beneath the Conference on Worldwide Commerce in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which lists all rhino species as endangered or critically endangered.
THE AFRICAN SOURCE
South Africa dominates international rhino horn seizures for one easy cause: it is house to many of the world’s remaining rhinos.
The nation has round 12,000 white rhinos – 76 per cent of the worldwide inhabitants – and a pair of,300 black rhinos, representing 34 per cent of that species, in keeping with WWF South Africa’s rhino conservation supervisor Jeff Cooke.
