Images that highlight the trade killing our rhinos

[xchrom]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/20/vietnam-illegal-trade-rhino-horn


A woman grinds rhino horn to be mixed with water and then drunk in the belief it can cure health problems. Photograph: Brent Stirton/ Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2012 Photograph: Brent Stirton (South Africa) for the Observer

A wealthy Vietnamese woman sits at a roadside cafe and prepares a dish for her own consumption. She is grinding up rhino horn. After a few minutes, water is added and she drinks the mixture out of a shot glass as a cure for her kidney stones. The woman paid several thousand US dollars for the piece of horn. The rhino died.

The image is one of a series taken by South African photographer Brent Stirton, who won an award at the 2012 Veolia Environnement Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition, which opened at the Natural History Museum London on Friday. Entitled "Deadly Medicine: Rhinos", the six photographs in his award-winning portfolio depict the impact of poaching on the world, from game rangers in action to end users of rhino horn who believe it to be a medicine.

Poaching has become a major part of organised global crime and so well organised that it threatens to wipe out some of the world's five remaining species of rhinos. Two of them, the Javan and the Sumatran, have been reduced to populations of only a few dozen each. Populations of the other three – black, white and one-horned rhinos – are also threatened.

"The illegal trade in wildlife is now the third largest criminal industry in the world and rhino poaching plays a key role," Stirton told the Observer

[stuntcat]

1. shame on them

shame shame

k, r

[Coexist]

2. :(

[NickB79]

3. Kidney stones can be very painful

She deserves every second of that pain