The absurd logic of shooting black rhinos to save them

The Dallas Safari Club is a curious organization that — on the surface, at least — appears to have a relatively noble goal. Its website, BigGame.org, says that its "conservation and education efforts today ensure that future generations enjoy watching and hunting wildlife tomorrow."

This upcoming January, the DSC is holding a special auction in which all proceeds will be dedicated to the conservation of the endangered African black rhino, a worthwhile effort by just about anyone's standard. Yet it's what the DSC is auctioning that is raising eyebrows and drawing fervent criticism. For the prize, which is expected to fetch anywhere between $250,000 to $1 million, is a special permit granted by the Republic of Namibia to shoot and kill a black rhino.

The black rhino is a rare and endangered variety of which there are only 4,880 in the whole world, according to the World Wildlife Fund, below the magic 5,000 population figure that biologists theorize any given species needs to survive.

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"First and foremost, this is about saving the black rhino," Ben Carter, the executive director of the Dallas Safari Club, said in a statement. "There is a biological reason for this hunt, and it's based on a fundamental premise of modern wildlife management: Populations matter; individuals don't. By removing counterproductive individuals from a herd, rhino populations can actually grow."

All proceeds, they say, will go to a small African NGO called the Save the Rhino trust, which for the past 30 years has dedicated itself to saving dwindling rhino populations in the Kunene and Erongo regions in Namibia. One small hiccup: The Save the Rhino trust says it was not aware of the DSC's intentions.

"Save the Rhino Trust does not have any decision making power on issues such as hunting rhino in or outside of Namibia and we are not at all part of these decisions. In fact we are not even informed of these decisions," said the trust in a statement on its website. "We do not directly receive money from hunting, we have nothing to do with hunting, and we have not at all been approached in this regard either, so to say that we will be receiving money from a rhino hunt is entirely inaccurate."

There are limitations to the hunt. The DSC claims the permit will allow a hunter to trail and capture only an older non-breeding male rhino. Breeding mothers are off-limits.

"The trophy is just astronomical, I cannot imagine having a black rhino," said DSC spokesperson Game Young in a video announcement that has since been taken down, but has been preserved for posterity by The Colbert Report. "I cannot even begin to tell you how rare this is."

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Indeed, the Club argues that removing "certain individuals" can even help rhino populations grow.

That's all fine and good. Except the solitary creatures' biggest threat isn't locking horns in face-to-face combat; it's man. In the 1970s, it was estimated that there were 70,000 rhinos roaming the continent. Now, the entire population of the species is comparable to the size of Harvard's incoming freshman class.

That steep population decline, according to the World Wildlife Fund, comes down to brutal and aggressive poaching. The black rhino's horn can fetch up to $25,000 a pound in the shadowy penumbra of the Asian black market. In high-demand countries like Vietnam or China, their horns are thought to treat everything from cancer to headaches to possession by the devil.

"Poachers come by helicopter and dart a rhino from the air with a powerful tranquilizer, a drug three thousand times more powerful than morphine," says Al Jazeera's Jonah Hull, who reports that poachers kill a rhino in South Africa almost every single day. "As (a rhino) succumbs to deep sedation, they take a chainsaw to her face. The machine's sharp teeth tear into her skull, removing her nasal cavities, exposing parts of her brain… (The horn) will be sold to a middle man for a small fortune."

All of which makes the DSC's intentions feel, well, misguided. "It seems counterintuitive to sell the ability to shoot an animal as a means to save a species," said Rita Beving Griggs, a Dallas-based representative of the Sierra Club.

That's at least partly correct, as it would be just as counterintuitive of the Redwood Forest Institute to raise funding by chopping down redwoods and selling trinkets made from their timber.

But the game aspect of shooting and killing an older non-breeding male rhino for sports may be overstated. "Shooting a rhino is about as difficult as shooting a tank," Wayne Pacelle, president of the Humane Society of the United States told ABC News. "In terms of the sportsmanship component it's totally lacking."

Pacelle added, "The first rule of protecting a rare species is to limit the human [related] killing."