Killing for Profit: Exposing the Illegal Rhino Horn Trade (49 page)

A year later, two more couriers unfortunate enough to stumble into Manyathi’s court are slapped with prison sentences of twelve and eight years respectively. Duc Manh Chu and Nguyen Phi Hung had been arrested at OR Tambo thirty minutes before the opening ceremony of the FIFA World Cup on 11 June 2010. They had hoped that customs officials would be distracted by the spectacle playing out on television. They were wrong. The X-ray-scanner operators sounded the alarm. Twelve rhino horns were found stuffed in Chu’s luggage. A further six horns were found in Hung’s bags.

Manyathi is clearly unimpressed. ‘I don’t one day want to have to show my grandchildren pictures of rhinos because all the live animals have been killed by greedy people,’ he says in his judgment. Chu gets the maximum sentence: ten years for the illegal possession of the horns. Manyathi tacks on an additional two years for fraud. There is no option of a fine. Hung gets six years on the illegal-possession charge – effectively one year for each horn – and two years for fraud. Both men later appeal their sentences … without success.

December 2011, Northern Vietnam

Mrs Dung’s smile is bright and birdlike. ‘I have just what you’re looking for,’ she says, leading the way to the back of the shop. Shelves cluttered with ceramic vases, plates, tea sets, cups, bowls, spoons and serving dishes line the room. ‘I sell many of these,’ she tells me, scratching around in the darkness and dust of a corner shelf. ‘Last year I sold 800 to the army. In total, I think I sold about 1 800. Quite a few went to clients outside Vietnam …’

‘Here,’ she says, dusting something off. ‘Sixteen dollars for the big one. Eight dollars for the small.’ She hands me two rather unremarkable-looking dishes, one inside the other. Both have been glazed a dark aquamarine. ‘You can touch inside if your hands are clean,’ she nods. The bases of the dishes are white and rough. They feel unfinished, with raised nodules like fine sandpaper. A shallow lip protrudes outwards.

‘These are what you use to make the medicine,’ Mrs Dung says. ‘You grind a little bit of the horn off on the bottom in hot water and drink it. It is good for many treatments. For the first stage of cancer, it is very good. The second stage … Well, there is nothing much you can do.’ Neatly painted in white on the side of the larger dish is an image of an African rhino. One of its feet is raised and its head is down. It looks to me as if it is running.

The village of Bat Trang is situated on the polluted banks of the Red River, thirteen kilometres from the centre of the Vietnamese capital, Hanoi. It is
famed for its pottery and ceramics and has been for several hundred years. The old traditions still thrive here, but these days the villagers derive much of their income from producing cheap knock-offs of Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. It is a monotonous parade of writhing Chinese dragons, impossibly picturesque mountain villages, crystal streams and ancient woods. I read somewhere that the villagers export ceramics worth about $40 million every year. As I wander the streets, I stumble upon the occasional oddity – a ceramic Smurf, an American eagle, a clay tiger, a crocodile, a buxom porcelain woman in an orange bikini, two wrestlers, and even an ancient Chinese figure wearing a pair of seventies shades.

There is a wet sheen on the roads where they have been hosed down to dampen the fine grey dust from the pottery works. Narrow alleyways lead from the main streets to a hidden network of workshops, spinning potters’ wheels and fiery kilns. The air is thick with the loamy smell of wet clay. There is also a tantalising scent of spring onions, ginger, cloves, pepper and cilantro. It is lunch time, and the potters and shopkeepers are all tucking into steaming bowls of
pho bo
, the delectable beef noodle broth that is practically Vietnam’s staple dish.

Two words and a photograph in a tiny sports shop in central Hanoi led me to Bat Trang. Little more than a hole in the wall with a metal shutter, the shop sold tennis rackets, squash rackets and fake Nike socks. A wheeled display cabinet stood at the entrance. Two pamphlets had been stuck up against the glass. One advocated the benefits of a brand of racket strings. The other promoted a ceramic dish. Below the latter was a slogan in Vietnamese that I couldn’t understand, but three words stood out.
Sù’ng tê giác
– rhino horns. The pamphlet, as I would later discover, was an advert for a ‘high-quality rhino horn grinding dish’. On the back of it was an image of a black rhino in a green field.

And there was an address and a telephone number in Bat Trang.

Adverts for rhino horn grinding-dishes abound on Vietnamese websites, online social networks and discussion forums. A typical advert, which had received 7 720 hits and nearly 300 responses by the time I viewed it, recommended the use of rhino horn for more than seventy medical conditions, ranging from heat stroke and high fevers to delirium, convulsions, ‘hysteria’, encephalitis, infections and poisoning. Somewhat surprisingly – given that the use of rhino horn as an aphrodisiac has long been discounted as the sensationalist invention of the Western media – the advert noted that it could also be used to treat impotence.

There were detailed instructions on its use. Pour a little hot water into the grinding-dish, grasp the horn and, using circular movements, rub it against the roughened base of the dish. As fragments of horn mix with the water, it should turn a milky white. The smell it gives off is slightly acrid.

‘Drink 0.5 to 1 grams a day,’ the advert advises. ‘The horn can be used on its own or with other medicines for the purpose of healing.’ Prospective customers are warned against buying ‘low-quality dishes’, which may contain ‘impurities and toxic chemicals’. The base of a ‘quality dish’ should be white and ‘feel a bit rough’ in contrast to a substandard dish, which invariably has a yellow, uneven base and ‘loses its roughness after first use’. In Vietnam there has been a steady, resurgent interest in traditional medicine in recent decades. Scattered across the country today are roughly fifty institutes and hospitals where traditional medicine is practised. Most state hospitals have departments of traditional medicine, and about 9 000 health centres are licensed to practise it.

A comprehensive pharmacopoeia – published in Vietnam as recently as 2006 – suggests that rhino horn is ‘effective in treating ailments like high fever, delirium, convulsions and headaches’. Four grams can supposedly treat a drug overdose. And a mixture of burnt rhino horn powder, water, aloe, nuts and radish seeds will cure cholera, the authors claim. Rhino horn, the book continues, should ideally be ‘harvested by splitting the thick skin from around the nose bone and carefully scraping the hard membrane at the base of the horn’.

‘Good quality horns are coloured black, polished, without cracks and have … a sweet smell … Rhino horns taste a bit salty, bitter and sour.’ When
ingested, the authors claim, it targets the heart, liver and lungs, helps reduce temperature, calms the mind and reduces pain. It should not be used by pregnant women or in cases where fever is relatively low. It is also ‘recently considered a strong aphrodisiac’, the entry states.

The latter claim is supported by a 2012 TRAFFIC report that describes evidence of a ‘rhino wine’ being marketed as a performance enhancer to ‘improve the sexual prowess of men’. Known locally as
tuu giac
, it is used exclusively by wealthy consumers, and can apparently be made from any rhino derivative, including blood, dried dung, a penis or fragments of horn mixed with a strong rice wine. This, according to TRAFFIC, seems to parallel developments in the tiger bone trade. Increasingly, tiger bones, which have traditionally been used in the treatment of arthritis, are being marketed in tiger wine concoctions as a sex tonic.

According to the pharmacopoeia, skin from a rhino’s groin and armpits ‘can be used to help strengthen our health to prevent disease’. The skin is ‘processed by removing fur, membrane and grease from the skin, exposing it to the sun during the day and drying it by fire at night for 100 days, soaking it in wine for a month, then exposing it to the sun or drying by fire’. Before it can be used medicinally, it is ‘soaked in ash water for seven nights, washed and steamed until it is well-cooked’ and then ‘eaten every day’.

The chapter concludes with a note to readers. The rhino population, it states, is in rapid decline worldwide. ‘It has become an extremely precious species at risk of extinction and included in the Red Book of many countries … They are now protected by strict and comprehensive legislation and scientists are studying methods to cut their horns to protect them from hunting.’

Whether rhino horn has medical properties or not is largely irrelevant. In Southeast Asia, many people still believe that it does, and that belief will not be easily swayed, even with overwhelming scientific evidence to the contrary.

The horn has been used in traditional medicines for at least 2 000 years. It is used in various herbal remedies and compounds to break a range of ailments, primarily for its supposed antipyretic or fever-reducing qualities.

The handful of published scientific studies that has been conducted into the purported medical benefits of rhino horn have demonstrated little. In
1990, researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that extracts of both rhino horn and buffalo horn demonstrated ‘significant antipyretic action’ in rats, but only at massively high doses, far higher than would be used by a human patient. Seven years later, scientists at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg came to the contrary view. They dismissed the claims as a ‘myth’ after carrying out experiments which, they wrote, ‘unequivocally’ proved that rhino horn administered to rabbits had absolutely no fever-reducing qualities.

Mrs Dung is in an expansive mood. ‘You use very little water in the dish because otherwise it dilutes the horn too much,’ she tells me. ‘I use it for back pain and arthritis. It is also very good for the blood.’ Where did she buy it? ‘I got a little bit of horn from a soldier. It was very expensive. About 10 million dong [roughly $500]. But you can use it many times. Sometimes people sell tiny bottles of horn scrapings for 1 million dong. If you can buy a whole horn, it is good for the whole life of the family. But only rich families can afford it.’