KRUGER NATIONAL PARK, South Africa: When Singapore customs officers investigated a suspicious shipment of furniture fittings at Changi Airport last month, a pungent smell led them to something far more sinister.
Inside the cargo from South Africa were 20 rhino horns weighing 35.7kg and worth around S$1.13 million (US$870,000), along with 150kg of other animal parts including bones, teeth and claws.
The Nov 8 seizure marked Singapore’s largest rhino horn haul to date, surpassing a 34.7kg cache intercepted in 2022. Both shipments followed the same 9,000km route from South Africa to Laos, a known destination for trafficked wildlife products.
Wildlife experts say Singapore has become a transit hub in a smuggling pipeline that begins in South Africa’s rhinoceros-rich grasslands and terminates in Asian markets where the horns – despite being composed simply of keratin, like human fingernails – command high prices as supposed medicine and status symbols.
The trading of rhino horns is prohibited under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which lists all rhino species as endangered or critically endangered.
THE AFRICAN SOURCE
South Africa dominates global rhino horn seizures for one simple reason: it’s home to most of the world’s remaining rhinos.
The country has around 12,000 white rhinos – 76 per cent of the global population – and 2,300 black rhinos, representing 34 per cent of that species, according to WWF South Africa’s rhino conservation manager Jeff Cooke.