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The arrest of former rhino breeder John Hume has reignited the debate over Africa's growing rhino horn stockpiles.
Conservationists are divided between destroying the horns to deter poaching and selling them to fund conservation efforts.
The controversy highlights the challenges of balancing ethical wildlife protection with financial needs in African countries.
The recent arrest of prominent former rhino baron, John Hume, and five others for allegedly running a criminal racket that trafficked nearly 1,000 rhino horns from South Africa, has brought the fore the emotive debate about what should be done to the rhino horn stockpiles that have continued to grow since a ban on international rhino horn trade came into effect nearly five decades ago.
Hume and his co-accused were arraigned before a South African court on August 19, 2025 for allegedly taking advantage of the loophole that local trade is legal in the country, to release 960 rhino horns from his vaults, using false information to make them appear like local sales.
The debate pits conservationists on different sides of the isle. On one side is the no-trade lobby that is pushing for the destruction of these stockpiles, which they say give the misleading impression that there is value in the horn, thereby encouraging poaching. On the other side, there is the pro-trade people that insists that since lucrative markets exist for the rhino horns, they should be sold and the proceeds used to fund conservational efforts. Worse still, even those within each of these two camps do not agree on how their preferred side should go.
Countries such as Kenya, Mozambique and India have in the past burnt their ivory and rhino horn stockpiles to demonstrate their commitment to end the trade. But most Africa countries have continued to keep their ivory and rhino horn stockpiles, hoping to influence the reopening of international trade in these products and make a windfall.
The international ban on rhino horn trading has been in place since 1977, allowing for a steady growth in the stockpiles from natural deaths, de-horning exercises, trophy hunting and those confiscated from criminal syndicates.
For countries like South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana and others with sizeable rhino populations, these stockpiles can be huge. In South Africa, where there is a huge game farming industry, rhinos, lions and other animals are reared on commercial basis, and the bulk of its 70,000 kg-plus rhino horn stockpile is in private hands.
Some Asian countries have a market for rhino horn, reportedly fetching end prices of as high as $65,000 per kilogramme), since it is used as a status symbol, in traditional Chinese medicine and also as an aphrodisiac, despite any proven benefits.
EMS Foundation, a South African social justice non-governmental organisation, showed in its report that the stockpiles serve to whet the appetite for more accessible rhino horn, in increased amounts. This leads to poaching and costly knock-on effects such as the need for greater investment in rhino protection and heightened danger to those guarding the animals.
The integrity of those entrusted with the stockpiles is also not guaranteed, with horns ending up in illegal markets over decades. Thus, a growing stockpile means highers risks and expenses.
In the Hume case, hundreds of horns traceable to his vaults have been repeatedly intercepted at South African airports destined for international markets.
These are some of the arguments that the no-trade lobby uses to argue that destroying rhino horn stockpiles would show the worthlessness of the horn as a commodity.
“Rather than banking on the extinction of rhinos, South Africa must embrace rhino horn stockpile destruction as an anti-poaching, anti-trafficking and demand reduction tool to meaningfully contribute to the ethical protection of rhino populations in Africa and Asia and to mitigate their extinction,” the EMS Foundation says.
Jason Gilchrist, ecologist at Edinburgh Napier University and no-trade proponent, said it is possible to degrade the rhino horn to a point where it becomes socially unacceptable. “I believe that the key to saving the rhino is demand reduction.”
Promoting behaviour change among consumers through public campaigns, he added, can turn the possession of rhino horn into a badge of shame rather than a medallion of status, thus decreasing demand and disintevising poaching.
This would also stop private rhino farming for horns, he noted. “I am against ‘saving’ the rhino by domesticating them: I want to see wild animals living a natural life in their natural environment — contributing to the ecosystem. Symbolic funeral pyres of burning rhino horn may be the best way forward for rhino conservation.”
Hanno Nusch, the chief executive officer of Rhino Revolution, who is pro-trade told Down To Earth (DTE) that it would be counter-productive if resources from rhino products are not used for their upkeep and protection.
“Given we must trim horns anyway for safety, not reinvesting that horn’s value into protection and habitat expansion is counter-productive,” he said. “A regulated, ethical channel turns a necessary, non-lethal intervention into funding that benefits rhinos, the land they inhabit and the people looking after them.”
Rhino horn trimming (de-horning), he added, has been used in southern Africa since the late 1980s and is now rigorously evidenced as effective. He highlighted that a new multi-reserve analysis (2017-2023) found the annual poaching risk for horned rhinos was about 13 per cent, compared to about 0.6 per cent for dehorned animals — a 95 per cent relative reduction.
Across eight dehorning reserves, poaching fell by 78 per cent, while consuming only 1.2 per cent of anti-poaching budgets.
“Bottom line: Trimming cuts poaching risk from around 13 per cent to 0.6 per cent and, paired with legal, tightly controlled utilisation, can finance protection and range expansion — making a live rhino worth more than a dead one, exactly the outcome we as Rhino Revolution NPC seek.”
The danger with trading is that calls for sale of rhino horns are not coming from people with sincere conservation motives, but from cash-strapped African governments hoping to use the proceeds of the horn sales to fund their budgets and not conservation, and private game who are primarily motivated by profit, said Map Ives, national rhino co-ordinator at Rhino Conservation Botswana.
“On one hand are many African countries that are always desperately short of money for national development,” Ives told DTE. “They insist on the right to utilise wildlife and wildlife products to help fund their countries.”
Within those countries, he added, there are national parks, game reserves and privately-owned wildlife estates, all of which are themselves desperately short of money to fund their security and anti-poaching programmes. “This combination of governments, parks and privately-owned wildlife people are extremely loud about the need to sell stockpiles on the international market to raise the billions of dollars that are very much needed to combat the organised and syndicated criminal organisations against whom they are pitted. If these stockpiles could be sold and the money put directly back into the conservation arena then it might equalise the battle.”
But this is not the case as proceeds from these sales are diverted to other uses, he shared. Although he understands the financial constraints of African countries, he said he believes stockpiles should be destroyed, unless sale is regulated and the entire proceeds is utilised for conservation.
There are some lessons from the Hume’s case, said Adams Cassinga, the founder of Conserv Congo, an organisation that fights wildlife crimes. “We learn that conservation succeeds only when it is anchored in integrity, shared responsibility and justice — when the survival of species is not dependent on fortunes, loopholes or the will of the powerful, but on a collective recognition that their survival is bound to our own.”