Aug 052010
People suck.
Poachers have butchered the last adult rhinoceros at a South African game reserve, cutting off her horn and letting her bleed to death, the chief game ranger says.
“We’ve had rhinos here for 20 years,” Japie Mostert told the Star on Thursday from the Krugersdorp Game Reserve, 60 kilometres northwest of Johannesburg. “She was the last one.”
The nine-year-old rhino at the 1,400-hectare reserve was likely attacked by poachers who hovered in a helicopter, shot her with a tranquillizer dart then leapt out and sliced her horn off with a chainsaw, Mostert said.
15 Responses to “Sigh.”
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I thought that with being aware of the poachers all these years that
they would have better control of the situation.
You just can’t make this shit up, can you?
You had better hope that tranquilizer is working _really_ well before you take that chainsaw to it, or you and Vlad The Impaler’s victims are going to have a lot in common, as both had something really sharp shoved up their rear.
A decade or so back, CNN used to have a section they would run in the middle of the night that showcased unedited news stories from around the world.
One of these consisted of the apprehension and execution on the spot of elephant ivory poachers in Africa.
What really was interesting about the report (other than getting to see the poachers getting shot in the head) was how exactly they were killing the elephants; realizing that a wounded elephant could kill them before it died after being shot by a rifle, they decided to be sure that a single shot would bring it down…in this case a single shot from a RPG-7 antitank rocket launcher they were found in possestion of.
Call it sick or morbid, but I would _really_ like to see what happens to an elephant when you hit it with a hollow charge warhead.
I keep picturing a small hole in one side with a scorch mark around it, and a two-foot-wide crater in the far side.
This is probably a aftereffect of all the “US Army vs. Dinosaurs” comics I read as a kid: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/dinosaur/files/2008/12/showcasewarforgot.jpg
Their favored method of dealing with these horrible creatures was throwing grenades into their mouths.
About now that horn is on its way to China or Vietnam where superstitious idiots think it will cure everything from headaches to boils to demonic possession.
If it were my game preserve I’d be selling licenses to kill poachers about now.
Here’s the thing about the larger situation that really pisses me off:
1) The Chinese (and I gather much of the rest of Asia) believes a lot of “eastern mystical bullshiot” about the healing properties of rhino horn, bear gallbladder, that sort of thing.
2) So they hunt these critters to extinction to get the stuff.
3) But most of the rest of the products that they manufacture and sell to each other, and the rest of the world, they seem pretty casual about having fake ingredients. Cat food filled with plastic, that sort of thing.
Surely it must be easier (and cheaper!) to create rhino-horn-powder-simulant than dealing with the real thing, yes? It’s not like the idiots who use the stuff are going to be able to run a scientific analysis or even notice the difference between rhino powder and, say, ground-up toenail clippings.
I suspect it’s kinda like the Japanese and their damned whale hunts. My understanding is that whale doesn’t really taste all that wonderful, and a good fraction of the whale meant goes to waste because it doesn’t get sold… but they keep doing it because it’s “culturally important” or some damned thing.
Boy, if you the ever considered a degree of emotion about the other members of humanity to degree you do about;
t non-human species in creation, it would really be something to see. What you’ve got going on here is the Rousuia concept that h8manity is bad,,qnd ntuere iw goodbd
Pat, did you lose your electricity?
I wonder about the level of hypocrisy we see here, too, Scott. It demonstrates that the Chinese rhino horn buyers live in a very special fantasy world: one in which their needs are more important than anyone else’s and in which they can do what they wish to anyone else.
One would think that an educated (or simply aware) body of buyers of rhino horn would be the group that encourages breeding of the animals. Perhaps, in their world, there is no future as we know it. (I’ve started to suspect that many non-European cultures see time as being something other than linear, and the concept of “future” may not exist for them.)
actually the japanese are hunting the whales to help the whales.
mostly what they take a Minke whales….which are overpopulated. so much so that the blue whales are having a hard time getting food enough to feed their young.
but, of course, you’ll never hear them say that on “whale wars”. it doesn’t fit the meme that ALL whales are endangered.
> Pat, did you lose your electricity?
My guess is that his sobriety ran out.
> mostly what they take a Minke whales….which are overpopulated. so much so that the blue whales are having a hard time getting food enough to feed their young.
Hmmm…
http://lenfestocean.org/publications/minke_whales.html
“Using analyses of genetic diversity, the authors estimate that the long-term population size of Antarctic minke whales falls within the range of estimates from three modern-day surveys of minkes in the Southern Ocean. The study, published in Molecular Ecology, does not support the proposition that an unusually large population of minke whales is competing with other whale species for a limited supply of krill.”
As for breeding rhinos for their horns: I will note that humans slaughter and consume pigs, cows and chickens in truly *vast* numbers. And somehow, these species don’t seem to be on the brink of extinction. Handled properly, being a target for humanity could be a positive *boon* for a species.
There’s a great line in the movie “Sahara.” The evil warlord refuses to do anything about a toxic waste problem, saying, “This is Africa. Nobody cares about Africa.”
There are good reasons why no one cares about Africa.
I wonder if rhino meat tastes good enough to be a reasonable export. Right now, it would be exported from America, it seems.
> I wonder if rhino meat tastes good enough to be a reasonable export.
If so, and if you could somehow start a rhino ranch in a western nation, it’d be the best thing to happen to the species in centuries.
Maybe the mystical appeal is in the rareity of the item so once you’ve bred enough to make it easy to get, the value goes way down, when the value goes down the venture becomes unprofitable. Many of the most valueable things in the world are either unique and beautiful or highly illegal and taboo in all cultures.
In the future where the ecosystem can no longer support the production of cows and most of the swordfish are gone, the value and cost of those commodities will skyrocket.
In William Gibson’s Neuromancer, krill is the main food source, red meat being a luxury item.
Bottom line, you want to save “endangered species” then you need to be breeding then in captivity. Massively. And releasing them back into the wild. If genetic diversity is so important then we should be insuring it through massive breeding and release programs. Not genetically modifying them, either. Separate specific genetic lines can be bred in captivity, and the hatchlings released into the same streams the native born are in. Same goes for all other “endangered species”, and as for whaling, as long as they go out in whaling boats and harpoon by hand I don’t have a problem with it. Oh, and as long as they kill those whale war cunts. I would actually send them money to kill those anti-human fucking assholes.
“My guess is that his sobriety ran out.”
That was indeed the case. 😉
Something extraordinary unexpected and fortunate occurred recently, and I was celebrating it.
Rhino horn is generally used as a aphrodisiac in the east, and having eaten whale meat, let me tell you it indeed does taste awful; my brother and his girlfriend ate some when I was young, and they both ended up vomiting it right back up.
From South Park, the real reason Japan hates Whales and Dolphins so much: http://www.ecorazzi.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/whalewhores3.jpg
Yes, it was they that bombed Hiroshima…at least that’s what the US government told them when they showed them that picture.
Admin said:
“If so, and if you could somehow start a rhino ranch in a western nation, it’d be the best thing to happen to the species in centuries.”
I’d like to see the fences that could keep those things in.
Probably some sort of reinforced concrete wall around the place; with a antitank minefield surrounding it, just in case. 😀