South Africa might seek the lifting of an international ban on trading the horns of endangered rhinoceroses, a conservation official said Wednesday.
"It's possible, though not absolutely certain," Martin Brooks, a rhino expert at the Natal Parks Board (NPB), told Reuters. "It's being debated at the moment."He said an application for the easing of curbs on rhino-horn trade could be made at a meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in the United States in November.
Brooks said that if trade were to be allowed, a technique for tracing the source of horn developed at the University of Cape Town would be an important safeguard.
"This could prevent the laundering of illegal horn as legal horn," said Brooks, who is chairman of the World Conservation Union's African rhino specialist group.
Researchers at the university have developed a technique of analyzing the chemical makeup of elephant tusks and rhino horns, which pinpoints their origin to within a small geographical area.
One of the researchers, Julia Lee-Thorp, said they had analyzed horn from Kenya, Tanzania, Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
"Wherever we've done it, it seems to work very well," she said. "It is an absolutely unequivocal test."
The technique relies on the fact that chemical elements in the horn, a dense hairlike material, can be traced back to the grass or leaves an animal has eaten and then back to the rocks in the area where the plants grew.
It can also be used to tell if a horn came from a white rhino, which has a relatively stable population, or a black rhino, which is more rare.
Clive Walker, chairman of South Africa's Rhino and Elephant Foundation, said, "The international ban on trade in rhino horn has been in effect for 18 years. It has probably failed to save a single rhino."