“This is the first time we’ve heard of it,” said Crawford Allan, senior director of TRAFFIC North America, a regional office of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). Depending on the species and the market, experts said, rhino horns are worth more than their weight in gold. Protected wildlife is the fourth largest form of criminal traffic in the world behind drugs, counterfeiting and human trafficking, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Global trade in rhino horn is banned by a U.N. convention, and its sale is illegal in France, according to Reuters, but as little as a kilo of rhino horn was worth about $54,000 on the black market in 2015. The warning signs, they said, came in the form of a spate of rhino horn thefts from private collections and exhibitions.

Source: Washington Post March 07, 2017 19:42 UTC