Can You Save Rhinos By Selling Their Horns?
Update, August 26, 2017: The online auction ended on August 25. "The auction yielded fewer sales and fewer bidders than anticipated, but the legal domestic trade has now been established and the road has been paved for future sales," Hume's lawyer, Izak Du Toit, wrote in a statement. Prices and names of bidders have not been released.
About 1,500 rhinos roam John Hume’s ranch in South Africa’s Klerksdorp, located a hundred miles from Johannesburg. Every 20 months or so Hume, who breeds more rhinos than anyone in the world, tranquilizes the animals and dehorns them. He does this to ward off poachers and for the potential to one day cash in on his more than six-ton stockpile.
That day has finally come.
On Monday, Hume plans to hold an online auction to sell 264 rhino horns to South African residents.
A moratorium on buying and selling rhino horn within South Africa has been in place since 2009, but in 2015 Hume and another rhino horn breeder filed suit to overturn it. A final court ruling in April opened the
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