South African court grants rhino rancher permission to auction horns

JOHANNESBURG — A South African court on Sunday ordered the government to allow the owner of the world's biggest private rhino herd to hold an online sale of rhino horn, which he aims to hold this week, his lawyer said.

John Hume has about 1,500 rhinos on his sprawling farm southeast of Johannesburg, where he breeds the animals.

White rhinos nearly went extinct last century but South African conservation efforts and private game farms have swelled their numbers in recent decades, though poachers are again putting them in danger.

Hume regularly cuts his rhinos' horns, which then grow back, and has built a large stockpile, some 500kg of which he plans to auction after in April successfully challenging government rules banning their sale.

He last week took South Africa's department of environmental affairs to court, as he had been issued with a permit which he said had not been handed to him.

"The court ordered they [the department of environmental affairs] should hand over the permit to us," Hume's lawyer Izak du Toit told Reuters, saying he would take collection of it on Monday.

South Africa is home to more than 80 per cent of the world's rhinos, whose population has been devastated by poaching for buyers in Vietnam and China, where it is coveted as an ingredient in traditional medicine.

Global trade in rhino horn is banned under a UN convention. That means any horn acquired legally in South Africa could not be exported, but conservationists have expressed concerns that domestic buyers could illicitly supply Asian markets.

Hume had said in papers to the high court seen by Reuters that the government was withholding already authorised permits for the sale of 264 horns in the August 21-24 auction.

The number of poached rhinos in South Africa fell by 13 to 529 between January and June compared with 2016, a trend welcomed with "cautious optimism" by the government in July.

But numbers had surged from 83 in 2008 to a record 1,215 in 2014 to meet burgeoning demand in newly affluent countries such as Vietnam, where the horns are used as status symbols and believed to contain aphrodisiac properties.