The recent landmark judgment on rhino horn exports and its implications for wildlife conservation

The Northern Cape Division of the High Court in Kimberley, on Friday, 31 October, ruled that rhino horn harvested from registered captive breeding operations can be exported for sale, as such facilities are devoted to conservation and not commerce.

Read more: Rhino horn harvested from captive breeding operations can be exported, high court rules

The applicant was Wicus Diedericks, who owns a captive breeding operation for rhinos on his conservancy.

Diedericks maintained that it cost him R20-million annually to feed, protect and propagate his white rhinos, and that he was running out of money to sustain the operation.

The decision comes in the face of a global ban on the international trade in rhino horn that was imposed in 1977 to stem the slaughter of the pachyderms.

Below are some of the issues stemming from the court ruling.

A legal global trade in rhino horn is not about to start anytime soon

The Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment has said it will appeal the decision, so the judicial process is far from exhausted and could drag on for many months or even years.

The main points of the decision — and potential problems  

The treaty that oversees the global trade in wild animals and parts derived from such species is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites).

Article VII of Cites makes provision for “exemptions” in animals or specimens bred in captivity for non-commercial purposes such as conservation. The court found that Cites’ exemptions for conservation-bred rhinos can be applied in this case.

Examples of species that have been traded under this exemption include the African grey parrot.

The court also ruled that export permits must be issued for horns from conservation breeding facilities and that no import permit is required from the receiving country.

But an importing country is not bound by South African jurisprudence — any importer must abide by the laws of their country. Major destinations for illicit rhino horn include Vietnam and China, where such imports remain illegal.

If the court decision withstands legal challenges, South Africa will be able to issue export permits — but it may be difficult to find importers, and rhino horn shipments could be confiscated on arrival at their destination.

Among the handful of countries that are not signatories to Cites are North Korea and South Sudan.

Only a few breeders will benefit if a legal global trade emerges from this decision

If a legal global trade becomes reality because of this decision, it will only apply to captive breeding operations in South Africa.

The largest such operation was owned by John Hume, who, in 2023, sold his project and 2,000 white rhinos to the NGO African Parks, whose stated goal is “rewilding”, which entails the gradual translocation of all the animals to reserves in South Africa and other African countries. African Parks has not signalled any intention to sell harvested horn from the rhinos.

According to the Private Rhino Owners Association, the other captive breeding operations in South Africa that would qualify for the exemption have about 1,000 rhinos — almost 7% of the national herd.

The South African government and other rhino range states have stockpiles of horn from seizures and operations to dehorn the animals on state-run reserves as an anti-poaching measure. These stockpiles do not appear to fall under the Cites exemption cited in the judgment.

But populations on state reserves are far more vulnerable than those on private reserves, which now hold about two-thirds of South Africa’s rhino population.

Read more: Two out of three SA white rhinos now in private hands while poachers decimate KZN herds

“You should structure the trade in such a way that the proceeds from the sales get directed to the most vulnerable wild populations, and this does not do that,” said Michael ’t Sas-Rolfes, a research fellow at the African Wildlife Economy Institute at Stellenbosch University.

Harvesting rhino horn  

To extract ivory from an elephant, the animal must be dead. Rhino horn — composed of keratin, the same protein found in your nails — can be harvested sustainably by darting and sedating the pachyderm and then shaving off the horn, which grows back.

There are animal welfare concerns on this front. Frequent darting is obviously disruptive for a rhino. And the horns evolved for reasons, including defence against predators.

Has the global ban worked? 

The global ban has demonstrably not been very successful. In the 1980s and 1990s, poaching decimated Africa’s black rhino population, with numbers plunging by 96%.

In South Africa, poaching soared from around 2007 to meet a huge demand from newly affluent Asian economies. The number of rhinos killed by poachers in South Africa peaked in 2014 at 1,215, and the significant decline in recent years — down to 420 in 2024 — is partly a reflection of falling numbers in the face of poaching.

Supporters of the ban have long maintained that lifting it and creating a legal market would increase poaching, with illegally taken horn from dead animals laundered into licit supplies. There has also been criticism of the conservation value of captive-bred operations.

Proponents of a legal trade — including Hume, who is accused of scheming to defy the global ban — have maintained that the proceeds are needed for conservation and to provide investment incentives for private breeders. They say that if the ban remains in place, the demand for rhino horn can only be met with poaching.

The primary markets for rhino horn are in Asia, where it is coveted for its perceived medicinal properties and for ornamentation and the status it bestows. Its use is deeply ingrained in Asian cultures, and it seems unlikely that demand will wither away, even if the medical properties of rhino horn do not withstand orthodox scientific scrutiny.

The bottom line

A legal international trade in rhino horn is not about to immediately lift off, but the judgment raises issues that point to the direction that contestation in this terrain may take.

The Cites exemptions will be hotly contested, and the judgment will probably be scrutinised by other range states such as Eswatini, which has previously tried to get Cites’ approval for a limited, regulated trade from its horn stockpiles. DM