The campaign to legalise trade in rhino horn as a potential solution to the poaching epidemic has gained a lot of traction in recent months, most recently with a paper written by leading environmental scientists in the journal Science calling for the move, and indications that regulations to allow the trade may be tabled at the next CITES meeting in 2016.

John Hume in his office, which opens onto a huge walk-in aviary, with hundreds of birds and five species of antelope, including klipspringer

One of the staunchest advocates of legalisation is John Hume, a wealthy South African businessman who is South Africa’s largest private rhino owner and breeder. He has around 800 rhino, mainly white, some at his game ranch in the lowveld, where they live in semi-natural conditions, but receive supplementary feeding, the majority reared on two farms in the highveld, in large enclosures with typically 80 animals in a space of 400-500 hectares. His rhinos are dehorned every 18 months, and the horns are immediately transferred off the farms to safekeeping in bank vaults, ready for the day when they may be legally traded.

John Hume believes that to reduce both poaching and the abuse of the trophy hunting permit system, trade should be legalised, and controlled by a central selling organisation, which would broker sales to consumer countries. A DNA database would be used to verify provenance of horn. We visited his farms and interviewed him twice last year – here are his views:

What is your main argument for legally trading horn harvested from ‘farmed’ rhino?

Dehorned white rhino: ‘A male in its lifetime will probably grow 50 or 60 kilos’.

My biggest argument for pro-legalisation is that every single legal killer of rhinos [ed’s note: rhino owners allowing their animals to be shot under permit as trophy animals] in this country would change his mind overnight, he would never again kill a rhino. 98 per cent of the rhinos legally killed in this country are not by genuine trophy hunters. Especially, white rhino – you don’t hunt a white rhino. It’s like killing a pig. It’s like shooting your cow. 98 per cent of the rhinos being killed legally in this country are being killed for the horn consumption. Very, very few are killed for trophies.

There are dozens who kill rhinos legally, probably more than a hundred, and some of them kill a lot. They are tightening the rules, but still a lot of rhinos are killed here. The reason every one of those killers would give you is that ‘we have no option’.

If you wanted to buy a rhino horn from me, for whatever reason – eat it, stick it on your wall – you would be unable to buy that rhino horn. If I wanted to sell you one of the hundreds of rhino horns that I’ve got, we’d both go to jail. But to get around that is very easy – just kill the rhino. And that is to me the most stupid situation, the legal killing of rhinos. Not one of those guys would kill his rhino if he could cut off the horn, give it to you, and keep the rhino alive. You would immediately stop all the legal slaughter of rhinos in this country, probably several hundred rhinos a year.

And poaching?

Poaching is rather different. The poaching, even if we had legalisation, would continue, but in my opinion not at the same level. We farmers would have something to say to these kingpins, the buyers: ‘You don’t have to kill my rhino to get the horn, I’m growing it for you anyway. If you don’t kill a rhino, a male in its lifetime will probably grow 50 or 60 kilos [of horn]. A female, maybe 30 or 40 kilos. Not only am I growing it for you, but I’m growing ten times what one [dead] animal will produce.

I think you would have a chance of getting through to a lot of them. New Zealand produces 160 tonne of deer velvet per year – they never get a deer poached. The Far Eastern market knows its going to get the velvet anyway, so why go to New Zealand and poach it?

If you put even three or four tonnes a year into the market I honestly believe it will dramatically reduce poaching. Those people who have their horn confiscated, it’s a big loss for them. They’ve got to accept that when they buy from a poacher it may be a bit cheaper, but they may lose that money. Or they may even be arrested. So now we’ll be giving them a legal option, so at least they can compare it with the illegal risk and profit.

White rhinos on highveld farm: ‘If you let us have our way, in twenty or thirty years time I guarantee you will have enough rhinos to stock your wilderness’.

What about animal rights objectors?

You can never get through to the animals rights activists. They will never be on the same page. We know they are quite influential. That is certainly a problem. But don’t forget whilst animal rights activists are mostly anti-killing, this is not killing. So they should be less ferocious about their opposition.

I’m quite sure if I could speak to David Attenborough for half an hour, I could make him see the light. Because if you let us have our way, in 20 or 30 years time I guarantee you will have enough rhinos to stock your wilderness areas and you won’t have to cut their horns, because you will have enough horn to supply the market.

You want to harvest horn from living animals. Why not just use horn from natural mortality?

Rhino at feeding point: ‘My tame, supplementary-fed rhinos, they are not spoilt forever’.

It’s illogical. If I leave it, my rhino, when it dies at the age of forty years, will yield maybe 4 to 10 kg, maybe 12 kilos. But over 40 years I’m going to supply the market with 50 or 60 kg from that rhino. I am prolonging the animal’s life because I am feeding it and looking after it, and it and its wife are producing many more young to stock the wilderness areas.

My tame, supplementary-fed rhinos, they are not spoilt forever because they are here, they can be very easily taken to wilderness areas, they can be your wild roaming rhinos. But I’m not going to send them there now because they will be poached.

If we go for a legalised trade in natural mortalities only, Kruger National Park is going to check it’s stockpile. They have hundreds of horns that were knocked off in trailers. Rhinos lose their horns in the veld. We have hundreds of horns that have been knocked off in fights, the animals are still alive. How are you going to tell the horns that come from natural mortality? That opens it up to the CITES officer who is issuing the permit to just issue it anyway, and it opens it up to more corruption in this country when we actually need less.

The big point is, you have a farmer who owns 10 rhino, and five are males. He has an old bull, he decides to sell it, but nobody is buying rhinos. He can’t get a permit for someone to come and shoot it. Now he’s going to be very tempted to see that rhino get a little lead poisoning in the brain. So he’s got a ‘natural mortality’ and he can sell the horn. Whether he gets a hunter to kill it or he fakes a natural mortality, either way he’s killing a rhino that gives him eight or nine kilos of horn, yet he’s capable of growing another 40 or even 50. So where’s the common sense?

Would you be content if, as a first step, CITES agreed to legal trade in horn only from natural mortality?

We need to supply the market and that will go a certain way to supplying the market. I’m wealthy enough to go on farming rhinos for the rest of my life without legalisation. If you talk to an investment guru he would tell you the last thing you sell is your rhino horn. Sell all your properties, shares, whatever, keep all your rhino horn. So leave my rhino horn in the vault if you like, take out the ones that have died – but who the hell’s going to prove which one died and didn’t die anyway? Anything that you can supply, any rhino horn you can supply to the Far East, is good not bad. Take all those bloody things out of museums, out of people’s attics, send them to China. It’ll save some of my rhinos being poached. To me that’s logic. But the world doesn’t see it that way. But where does that leave me? It may see me losing out, but it doesn’t leave me wrong.

But no-one knows the size of stockpiles or demand…

Absolutely correct. But you are supplying that demand now with rhinos that have been killed. And because you’ve driven it underground you’re never going to know exactly what it is. To me that is stupid. You will find out how big it is if you legalise it.

If demand grows, the price will grow. But don’t forget we will all have an enormous amount of money to protect our rhinos, including the national parks, whereas now we’ve got nothing. There’s no doubt you will still have the poacher, but now the buyer isn’t going to be so keen, because he’s got a legal option he does not have now. He’s going to judge the risk and profit. The higher the price goes the more likely it is going to be worth the risk for the poacher, but also the more money you’re going to have for protection.

Do you have confidence that CITES will eventually back legal trade?

CITES has 177 members. Of those, three quarters don’t have a continental clue and don’t care. They would be available to be swayed, monetarily or any other way, and the western powers in their stupidity would probably vote no. Europe would almost certainly vote in a block. Unless someone explains the poor rhino’s plight to them, they will probably vote no. What South Africa should do is get a contingent of rhino experts – Richard Emslie, Mike Eustace, Michael ‘t Sas-Rolfes, Anthony Hall-Martin – and go and explain to the governments of the world the pros and cons, the facts, not the rubbish you get on social media.

How did you get into breeding rhinos?

In 1992 I bought Mauricedale [his lowveld game farm] as a nice place to retire. I bought rhinos, both black and white, and that started my love affair with them. They are the most wonderful animals you’ll ever meet. During that time this whole poaching thing in Africa was happening and nobody could see it. The Western governments stood by in the late 20^th century with folded arms, doing nothing, while the poachers slaughtered animals across Africa. All of us like the underdog: the rhino is being persecuted more than any other animal on earth, he’s being persecuted because he’s a rhino. The very thing he’s being persecuted for could help save him from extinction, and we don’t let him.

My greatest excitement as a kid was to hold an egg. It just gave me a feeling of excitement running through my veins. The bigger and rarer the egg the better. Breeding anything is very nice. I’d love to be a cattle farmer. It would give me great pleasure.

Its not a business. Yes we sell some: when we started farming with rhinos the price was escalating. Your South African farmer will tell you he caused the price to escalate, to be worth more alive than dead. In the early 90s farmers were buying and breeding rhinos. When you got the calf you could sell it for more than you paid for the mum. That stopped in the last few years. If you look at the price ten years ago, it was probably slightly more than now, but in that ten years the price of producing anything has gone up certainly three times. That’s the rhino’s problem. A lot of farmers look at it as a business and say ‘What am I bothering with this for?’ And when our farmers decide to disinvest, nine out of ten farmers don’t care whether that rhino’s alive or dead in two weeks time, he only cares what money he gets for it.

Last year I bred 116 calves, five black, 111 white, and we lost ten of the calves. That’s normal. I hope to improve our farming methods in future. How? By molly coddling them, which the world doesn’t want us to do. To improve the inter-calving gap, to improve mortality. Why? To have more rhinos. The problem is the world says it wants more rhinos, but it doesn’t understand what to do to get more rhinos. I want to be producing 200 calves a year.

How often do you dehorn your rhinos?

We had hoped to dehorn every three years, but then one was poached that had a horn of three years’ growth, so now we dehorn them every fifteen or eighteen months, depending on growth: once there is more than 100mm that we can cut off.

Obviously it’s not good for the animal, they don’t like being anaesthetised. But they are dehorned on location and it’s the smallest of the things we do under anaesthetic, compared to other things [like translocation]. Yes, it’s dangerous, rhinos die under anaesthetic, there is a risk. We’ve not yet had one die of dehorning, but in transit, perhaps 1 per cent.

Rhinos are rhinos, they fight. My dehorned rhinos still kill other rhinos in fights. Obviously you’d have more mortality if they had horns. Dehorning rhinos also makes them safer from each other, and certainly safer from the poacher, even if not completely safe.

Have you ever sold rhino horn?
Yes, I sold rhino horn in 2006. 84 kilos at 8,000 rand [around £720] a kilo. The ban that was instituted in 1977 was only for the trade in rhino horn externally. It couldn’t cross an international boundary, it could be sold within South Africa. Until the national moratorium on rhino horn trade became law in South Africa in 2009, there was horn being sold left right and centre, with a permit, without a permit. The curve of increased poaching is directly in proportion to the government stopping internal trade, and stopping the issue of hunting permits to Vietnamese.

White rhinos on highveld farm: ‘We dehorn them every fifteen or eighteen months, depending on growth’.

You’ve argued that communities should be given rhinos to look after and profit from harvesting their horn…

If you analyse why the rhino lost in Africa, he lost because the communities were never on his side. The communities said, yeah give me some money and I’ll show you where a rhino is and you can kill it. If we donated 400 rhinos from the Kruger park every year, and we taught them how to farm the rhino – obviously we’d have to have legalisation – the communities would change their attitude to rhinos. At the moment the communities are very fertile ground for recruiting poachers. They are poor, they are unemployed, they probably were in the army. There is huge scope for poaching recruitment in our communities. If we could change that and have the communities on the side of the rhino, because they could make money out of horn, that would change and you would have barren soil for recruiting of poachers in the community. That would take a very intelligent, hard working government to get that in place over the next ten years.

Dehorned white rhino: ‘My rhino horn stocks are my fastest growing asset’.

Once you’ve legalised the trade in rhino horn, your progeny is going to be worth two, three times what it is now. It will still be very worthwhile being a rhino farmer. And the more people who want to rhino farm, the more you get for your progeny. I really think that that is something that could help the rhino a lot. At the moment the community areas, all they are is a very fertile recruiting ground for poachers. Unfortunately, all these arrests we see, it’s nothing. It’s not the poachers you should be arresting, it’s not the users, but unfortunately the middle men you will never arrest, because three quarters of them don’t come here. As it’s going now it’s a war we cannot win. For every poacher that you arrest they can recruit ten. You know how many ex-army people we have here, who can handle guns?

If we legalise trade isn’t that endorsing questionable beliefs in the medical value of horn?

I have an arthritis problem, I have a weight problem. Do you know how I am pummelled with magic remedies? I have a thousand different choices. What’s the difference? If you go to the Chinese and say it doesn’t work, they say that’s the problem with you bloody westerners, you’ve got your million and one bogus remedies that you punt and you stick your bloody rhino head on the wall to look at it lovingly for  50, 100 years and leave it to your children, so that’s all all right. But for us to use rhino horn, no that’s silly. And they don’t buy those arguments.

You’ve had lots of negative press – does that matter to you?

It doesn’t matter to me, I’m indifferent to it, but on behalf of the rhinos I’m irritated by it. The people who point a finger at me and say you’re only doing it for the money are wrong. But yes of course, I’m a capitalist, and yes of course one day I worry about what I’m going to leave my kids. If I have a dead investment, I’ll get rid of it and get something else. But I promise you, I don’t need legalisation, but the rhinos desperately need legalisation.

I don’t agree with this new thought that argues for a limited trade in natural mortalities only. For myself I don’t care. My stock of rhino horns that did not come from natural mortalities is 90 per cent of my stock, but I have enough money to continue with my passion for the rest of my life. I have enough money to continue with breeding as many rhinos as I want to breed – which is 200 per year. So does it matter if I don’t sell my horns? To me it doesn’t matter. To my heirs I don’t think it’s going to matter, because especially if rhinos go extinct in the wild, that asset will shoot through the roof. And it’s already growing much more than my other assets. My rhino horn stocks are my fastest growing asset. If I don’t sell them, I don’t care. The rhino is the one that needs legalisation desperately.