Teo Boon Ching, a Malaysian wildlife trafficker known by a range of aliases including the Godfather, has been jailed for 18 months in the United States for smuggling hundreds of kilos of horns from endangered rhinoceros. Ching, 58, was arrested in Thailand on a US extradition request in June 2022, after a covert operation exposed […]
Tag: rhinos

African Parks to rewild 2,000 rhinos from controversial breeding program
On Sept. 4, African Parks, a multinational nonprofit conservation organization, announced that it had purchased Platinum Rhino, John Hume’s controversial intensive rhino breeding operation, and intended to rewild the more than 2,000 southern white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum simum) that came with it. The news was universally welcomed by those Mongabay has spoken to in South […]

How to grow rhinos in a lab: the science that could save an endangered species
There are several parallel projects running across the world to save the northern white rhinoceros (Ceratotherium simum simum), one of Africa’s captivating and iconic wildlife species. With the death of last male in 2018 and with only two females alive, the species is functionally extinct. The most famous of these projects is an international research […]

World’s largest private rhino herd doesn’t have a buyer — or much of a future
On May 1 this year, an online auction for a controversial captive-breeding project that comes with one in eight of all southern white rhinos in the world ended in a whimper — with a grand total of zero bids. According to a press release on the website of the Platinum Rhino project, it received offline […]

Scientists make unexpected discovery inside 14,000-year-old frozen puppy
The 14,400-year-old Ice Age puppywas discovered frozen and had hairy tissues and a twig in its stomach which prompted researchers to question just what the prehistoric canine may have eaten. Finding a wooly rhino and cave lion inside Ice Age puppy In 2020 genetic analysts from Stockholm’s Natural History Museum confirmed that the hair belonged […]

After 17-Year Absence, White Rhinos Return to the DRC
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) recently welcomed the reintroduction of 16 southern white rhinoceroses to Garamba National Park, according to officials, as Phys.org reported. The last wild northern white rhino was poached there in 2006. The white rhinos were transported to Garamba, which lies in the northeastern part of the country, from a […]

The Sale of 2,000 Rhinos Could Boost Conservation Efforts
Rhinos are in trouble. Poaching has decimated their numbers in the wild, and there are now only about 22,000 rhinos across Africa. Enter John Hume, a South African entrepreneur who, 15 years ago, launched a massive rhinoceros breeding farm to combat poaching. Hume aimed to create a sustainable horn trade, with a legal supply from […]

Petition: Help Protect Endangered Rhinos from Poaching
In the past five years, poachers have killed 138 endangered rhinos in Botswana, which has amounted to around a third of all rhinos in the area. In the five years before that, poachers murdered only two rhinos. Officials have determined this has to do with increased demand in the marketplace. Poachers slaughtered one-third of Botswana’s […]