Ben Carter heard the story of the fearsome black rhinoceros while in Namibia more than a year ago, and it’s still fresh in his mind.
The bull roamed fields around a ranch where Carter stayed as a guest. It weighed nearly 3,000 pounds. It was said to be too old to sire offspring but jealously guarded cows in the herd, preventing them from breeding with younger males.
“He’s killed a couple of calves, a couple of cows and a breeding bull,” said Carter, executive director of the Dallas Safari Club, a group that advocates wildlife conservation through hunting. “He’s not contributing to the habitat; he’s just existing there.”
Carter never saw the bull. But like the rancher who told him the story, he felt that the rhino had to go for the sake of the herd.
Carter took the added step of asking the Namibia Ministry of Environment and Tourism in Windhoek to give his club permission to auction one of five permits the ministry issues each year to hunt problem rhinos.
That auction, held in Dallas last January, was a public relations disaster.
News outlets chronicled a battle that pitted hunters who say shooting problem rhinos allows the population to flourish against animal lovers who say killing any of the endangered animals for sport should not be encouraged.
The vitriol boiled over shortly after the auction, when a hunter who submitted the winning bid of $350,000 said he received death threats.
“It has been a nightmare,” said Corey Knowlton, a consultant to a hunting association in Virginia who has hunted big game around the world.
Now the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is smack in the middle of the mess. The agency will decide this month whether to grant Knowlton a permit to import the animal’s remains into the United States as a trophy after he kills it.
Black rhinos numbered 70,000 at the start of the 1960s, before a wave of hunting and poaching occurred. An international crackdown stopped poaching for a while, but it resumed several years ago when black market prices for rhino horn in China and Vietnam rose. Fewer than 5,000 of the animals remain.
Usually, the Fish and Wildlife Service receives three to eight public comments on applications for permits to import hunting trophies. But Knowlton’s application, along with that of a second rhino hunter — Michael Luzich, a Las Vegas investor — generated 15,000 e-mails and 135,000 signatures on a petition.
That number is “unusually high,” said Danielle Kessler, a specialist for the agency’s International Affairs program.
Knowlton said Tuesday that he’s confident that Fish and Wildlife will grant him a permit to import the trophy, and he’s not sure what he will do if the agency doesn’t. Namibia’s hunting season starts in February.
“There’s a group of rhinos that they want killed,” Knowlton said of Namibia. “Since this permit was approved, a number of rhinos have been killed by other rhinos.”
