Poaching
Unsustainable use and poaching are on the rise worldwide, and have been growing problems since the early 1990s. Indeed, af- ter a drop following the “poacher wars” in Africa in the 1960s to early 1980s, poaching gradually started again as enforcement went down, such as in the Serengeti (Metzger et al., 2010). Poaching also increased again in Central Asia and neighbour- ing China following the changes in the former USSR, and it has been particularly high since the mid-1990s. In Southeast Asia, as well as across Africa and Latin America, there has been an increase in poaching since the mid-2000s.
In Africa and Southeast Asia, the ivory trade and demand for Rhino horn has increased substantially. In September 2011, WWF reported that poachers had killed 287 rhinos in South Africa in 2011 alone (WWF, 2011; CNN, 2011), including six- teen critically endangered black rhinos, and the rhino is prob- ably extinct in the Democratic Republic of Congo (UNEP, 2010a). A shift has also been noted towards substantial poaching on the forest elephant in central and western Africa
(UNEP, 2010b). Many other migratory ungulate species are also exposed to poaching.
Overexploitation is the primary threat to large herbivores in central Eurasia. The dramatic decline of the Saiga antelope (Saiga tatarica) from approximately 1 million animals to less than 50,000 within a decade following the collapse of the So- viet Union is probably the fastest population crash of a large mammal in the last hundred years. This long-distance migrant is valuable for its meat and horn, the latter of which is used in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Poachers target the saiga males since only these bear the precious horn (see photos), which in turn has led to a reproductive collapse and the species becom- ing Critically Endangered (Milner-Gulland et al., 2003).
In this vast region, poaching rose dramatically during the 1990s to mid-2000s. Chiru antelopes (Pantholops hodgsonii), which are wanted for their highly valuable Shahtoosh wool, were exposed to heavy poaching and dropped from an estimat-
Figure 7: Major smuggling routes for rhino horn to and from Nepal (UNEP, 2010b).
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