South Africa’s Environmental Affairs Department has said it’s sending a mission to China following a record R18 million rhino horn bust in Hong Kong on Monday. So far, officials have released little information about the massive haul that left Cape Town harbour, but they have said this mission was a positive sign for relations with China.

Hong Kong customs officials discovered a total of 33 rhino horns, 758 ivory chopsticks and 127 ivory bracelets that had been consigned in a shipping container on a ship that had left Cape Town’s Port of Cape Town harbour.

According to Dr Richard Thomas, the communications co-ordinator for Traffic International, the wildlife trade monitoring network, this seizure was not normal:

Usually there are reports of one or two horns being smuggled out through the airports, I can’t think of such a shipment before.

He continued that a syndicate may be using a known perlemoen smuggling route and that the horn might be smuggled overland through China to Vietnam.

Vietnamese officials had seized a ton of ivory that had come from China just two weeks earlier, and there was a known active ivory-smuggling route between the two Far East countries.

Thomas and Traffic International are anxious that a new market with complex smuggling routes could be the reason the smugglers were so daring in shipping such a large consignment.

The Environmental Affairs Department’s, Albie Modise said officials will be sent to investigate those behind the shipment, but didn’t release information on who will be sent.

Just last week, the International Union for Conservation of Nature declared the western black rhino extinct, and this haul represents nearly a third of the total amount of rhino’s poached this year.

The latest figures indicate that 366 rhinos have been killed across South Africa since January, of which 209 have been killed in the Kruger National Park alone. In comparison, 199 poachers have been arrested over the same period.

[Sources: EWN, IOL]