Rhino horn: no medicinal properties (Image: Redux/eyevine)

Vietnam, currently the world’s top consumer of rhino horn, is gradually being weaned off a habit that last year saw a record 1004 rhinos killed in South Africa.

Signs that demand is weakening came from polls of 1000 Vietnamese citizens in six major cities, including the capital Hanoi. But they coincide with news that last year’s record rhino toll is likely to be exceeded this year.

The polls compared attitudes to rhino horn between August last year, when campaigns against the use of rhino horn began, and August this year.


In the second poll, 2.6 per cent of respondents said they would continue to buy and use rhino horn, down from 4.2 per cent before the campaign started, a reduction of 38 per cent. In Hanoi, the decline was twice as steep, falling from 4.5 per cent down to just 1 per cent.

“These poll results demonstrate that, even in a relatively short period of time, our demand reduction campaign has succeeded in significantly and dramatically altering public perception and influenced behaviour,” said Teresa Telecky of Humane Society International (HSI), the lobby group that helped organise the campaign, at a press conference in Hanoi last week. “The results offer a vital ray of hope for the survival of rhinos.”

Four countries named

A Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species (CITES) summit held in Bangkok, Thailand, in 2013 named Vietnam, alongside South Africa, Mozambique and the Czech Republic, as the countries most heavily involved in both the demand for and supply of rhino horn. In response, the Vietnamese government launched a three-year campaign in collaboration with HSI that aims to demolish the myth that rhino horn has medical benefits.

So far the campaign has disseminated messages through the 800,000 members of the Hanoi Women’s Association, the business community, local students groups and 40,000 school children, who received a book called I’m A Little Rhino. Advertisements appeared on billboards in Hanoi and at the city’s airport and on buses, while press articles carried the message wider throughout the country.

“People who consume it actually believe it can treat cancer and rheumatism,” says Telecky. “We told people that rhino horn has no medicinal properties, and that it’s illegal to buy, sell or transport it.” It’s a message that seems to be getting through. In the second poll, 38 per cent of respondents said they believed rhino horn has medicinal value, compared with 51 per cent before the campaign began. In Hanoi, this proportion was as low as 21 per cent.

Not done yet

Despite the encouraging results, supporters of the campaign remain dismayed by the latest figures from South Africa showing that, as of 22 September, 787 animals have already been poached this year, rapidly approaching the 1004 killed in 2013. “We’re still seeing serious levels of illegal killing,” says John Scanlon, secretary general of the CITES secretariat. “The poll figures are promising, but it’s the beginning, not the end of stopping this illicit trade.”

“Any progress to date falls a long way short of considering it ‘job done’,” says Gayle Burgess, a specialist on consumer change behaviour at TRAFFIC, an organisation that monitors illegal poaching. “If the sample accurately reflects the Vietnamese population as a whole, it would mean that there are still more than 2.3 million rhino horn users in the country, a considerable cause for alarm,” said Burgess. There are only 25,000 rhinos left worldwide.