The poached goods on the black market have such high value the poachers will do everything to get their hands on them. Last week four game rangers, who devote their life to protecting the wilderness and its wildlife, got shot and killed by poachers who were trying to poach a rhino. It is needless to say that the battle between game rangers and poachers has become a war where both groups aren’t shy to use heavy violence on each other.
This brings up a moral dilemma for the game rangers whose job it is to protect the wildlife at all costs. Are they willing to fight a war like this and to sacrifice human lives over these animals? Is the life of a rhino worth more than a human? These are the moral questions the game rangers are dealing with every day. We can almost say they are dealing with a kind of moral overload. At one hand they want to protect their national treasure in the form of the wildlife and the nature, but at the other hand by doing that they are killing the people from the surrounding communities.
While having a discussion with a ranger from iMfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa this subject came up and he told me a story about the whole ecosystem and that everything is connected. This is where I came to the realization that the poaching of a rhino for solely its horn, which is made up from the same material as human nails, isn’t only effecting the rhino population but a whole ecosystem. The rhino is such a big animal, taking away just one will affect this system dramatically. The birds eating from the rhino’s back will not survive, the grass the rhino is eating will overgrow the other types of vegetation and the dung beetles won’t have anything to eat.
The Game Ranger strongly believes that what he and his predecessors have been fighting for the last 150 years, since the rhino almost got fully extinct, is worth fighting for. That is why he and his colleagues are trying to defend their wildlife against the poachers and all other danger. Not only by using force but also by educating the surrounding communities, and trying to educate the rest of the world in the hope that people will realize that rhino horn isn’t something special, but a rhino walking in the wild is.
I hope one day the rest of the world, especially the people feeding the black market and the ones buying from it, will one day understand that ivory and other poached don’t have any special healing or aphrodisiac powers, and are definitely not worth losing human lives over.