Rhinos have been killed, their horns taken for aesthetic and pseudo-medicinal properties for thousands of years. Many different groups of people throughout history used rhino horn for different things. The Greeks thought that it purified water and the Persians thought that it could detect poisoned liquids. The most prevalent use of the horn however, continues to be in Asian countries like China, where it is used as for a cure-all for many different sicknesses. Rhino horns are similar to horses’ hooves, they are composed of keratin, the same thing human hair and fingernails are made of. And their worth is completely socially constructed.

The rhino horn trade has also recently made its way to Vietnam, where it is sold as a cure from anything from a hangover to cancer. Being able to buy a rhino horn is also a social status symbol. The organization TRAFFIC, a wildlife trade monitoring network, conducted a survey that concluded that the main motivation to purchase a rhino horn was a reaffirmation of social status, rather than a purely medical motivation.

As of September, 730 rhinos have been killed in South Africa in 2014 alone. Accounting for poaching habitat loss, the South African parliament officials have speculated that “by 2019 we will only see or hear rhinos on Google or in the library.”

This is a huge jump in poaching, which began to really increase in 2008 when 83 rhinos were killed, and 122 were killed in the following year. By 2012, 688 rhinos were poached for their horns, and 1,004 were killed in 2013. The rhino population is rapidly dwindling, while the human thirst for their horns seems to be growing exponentially every year.

Although rhino horn trade has been banned internationally under CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Fauna and Flora), it still exists, especially in Asian countries like Vietnam, China and Yemen. And the good news is that many people are starting to realize that the horn has no medicinal value, creating a dip in rhino horn trade. But the worldwide demand for this expensive commodity (it can be worth up to $100,00 for a kilogram) still exists.

There are many solutions to this ancient issue being considered by world leaders, like dehorning, which leaves the rhino with a nub rather than a full horn. Unfortunately this doesn’t always stop poachers. Another controversial solution is legalizing the rhino horn trade hopefully eliminating the monopoly poachers have on the rhino horn market. No solution can be considered completely on its own and the first priority in this issue must be the immediate protection of the surviving rhinos, which is easier said than done. Hopefully the world won’t be rhino-less by 2020.

Here are some links to basic rhino info and the rhino horn trade:

http://www.savetherhino.org/rhino_info/threats_to_rhino/poaching_for_traditional_chinese_medicine

http://www.npr.org/blogs/parallels/2013/05/14/181587969/Vietnams-Appetite-For-Rhino-Horn-Drives-Poaching-In-Africa

http://www.rhinos.org/25-things-you-didn-t-know-about-rhinos

http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/8966/20140910/poaching-update-more-than-730-rhinos-killed-so-far-this-year.htm

Do nonhumans have certain rights that we aren’t currently granting them? This is one of the questions addressed in a case regarding chimpanzee personhood that is currently going though the New York Supreme Court.

The Nonhuman Rights Project is pursuing lawsuits on behalf of several chimpanzees in New York. Each chimp has a background filled with abuse, from deplorable living conditions, mistreatment in the entertainment industry to being experimented upon. The Nonhuman Rights Project is an organization whose mission is “through education and litigation, to change the common law status of at least some nonhuman animals from mere ‘things,’ which lack the capacity to possess any legal right, to ‘persons,’ who possess such fundamental rights as bodily integrity and bodily liberty, and those other legal rights to which evolving standards of morality, scientific discovery, and human experience entitle them.” This project is representing the cases of these chimpanzees and fighting for them to be granted legal personhood.

Personhood refers to any entity capable of having legal rights. Some legal persons currently recognized by the law around the world include American corporations and the Whanganui River in New Zealand. Additionally, many companies have debated the personhood of animals. In 1992 Switzerland changed its constitutional recognition of animals from things to beings. And it wasn’t the last to make such a change; in 2007, the Balearic Islands, a province of Spain, was the first place in the world to grant legal rights and personhood to great apes. This trend has spread to other countries around the world, and now it has finally come up in America.

If these New York chimpanzees are recognized as legal persons, they will be granted lives that are free from bodily harm. Chimpanzees and other great apes have demonstrated cognitive properties unnervingly similar to our own, yet we sometimes treat them as mere property. This is not to say that something must have a certain type of intelligence in order to have legal rights, but hopefully it will be more likely to sway the courts in the chimps’ favor.

This case will be extremely influential, and considering how much footing the animals rights movement has gotten in recent years, it is an indication of a change in the way we see animals, and not just from a legal perspective. We are beginning to see animals as the sentient living beings they are, and it is so exciting to be able to witness this revolution of perception.

Here is a link to a interesting New York Times article on the subject:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/27/magazine/the-rights-of-man-and-beast.html?_r=0

Hello again humans! Today we have a hefty dose of anthropomorphism, and fortunately not much pessimism.

Animals, specifically primates, have been observed participating in what was thought to be exclusively human practices for many years. These observations date back to Jane Goodall’s research on chimpanzees using tools in 1960, something thought to be limited to humans until then. Many new instances of primates acting “like humans” have been witnessed since this discovery, but the two I am going to talk about today are: fashion and midwives.

A female white-headed langur monkey was seen assisting a younger female monkey giving birth, acting, as we would call it, a midwife. Researchers who observed the scene said that the younger female “complied immediately and did not show any resistance.” This not only demonstrates the cooperation of living things in a time of need, but that the practice of midwifery, though not extremely common among primates, is not completely exclusive to humans.

Another more obvious instance of primates exhibiting “human behavior” exists in one chimpanzee troop’s fashion practices. A chimpanzee in this troop began to stick long-stemmed pieces of grass in her ear, so it hung out, almost like an earring. This first chimpanzee sparked quite the trend among her troop: eight out of the twelve of them eventually mimicked this fashion statement. What makes this discovery more interesting is that this practice is confined to a single troop, indicating an isolated culture. The researchers who witnessed this behavior concluded that their observations “show that chimpanzees have a tendency to copy each others’ behavior, even when the adaptive value of the behavior is presumably absent.” The chimps have no practical reason for this grass-in-ear practice, yet they do it anyway. Indicating that they enjoy the aesthetic value of it. Just like humans with our fashion choices.

As more research comes to light regarding the similarities between humans and other species of animals, especially primates, maybe it will fundamentally change how we view them. Perhaps we will acknowledge a stronger relation to animals than we had ever thought.  In my next post I speak more to this issue, regarding how the law treats animals in America.

Here are some more in-depth sources about the primates mentioned above, and to Jane Goodall’s work:

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141006-the-monkey-that-became-a-midwife

http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-014-0766-8

http://www.janegoodall.org/chimpanzees/tool-use-hunting-other-discoveries

Check your species privilege, and happy learning.

Hello again, animal enthusiasts! Today we have some exciting news along to go along with the usual dose of pessimism. A new species of poison dart frog was discovered in Donoso, Panama!

This frog has a unique call, but was originally thought to be a different variety of another poison dart frog species. But after DNA analysis, it was concluded that this frog is unique. However, this exciting discovery is dampened by the fact that this frog, only just classified, is already in danger. Its habitat is a very small isolated area, and is being swiftly destroyed. Habitat loss isn’t the only danger to this little guy: collection of poison dart frogs for the pet trade is also a major threat to their wild existence. But the most ominous danger to this frog is the chytrid fungus.

The fungus is a skin disease that, some argue, has been responsible for the greatest disease-caused loss of biodiversity in human history. It has been detected on hundreds of amphibians in over thirty-five countries and has caused numerous extinctions of entire frog species and serious declines in others.

But there is hope, in what has come to be known as “Lazarus frogs.” These are species of frogs that had been thought to be extinct, but suddenly reappear. While unfortunately, this isn’t the case for most of the species that go extinct, these industrious amphibians are able to survive extinction.

It is largely unknown how important frogs are to the world’s ecosystems. We know that tadpoles keep waterways clean of algae. Adult frogs eat massive amount of insects, many of which are disease carriers that prove fatal to humans but not to frogs. Frogs are also a source of prey for many other animals. Without them, many ecosystems will likely collapse. We have a responsibility to make sure that they stay around.

Here are some links to the new species discovery, and the search for lost frogs:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/09/140926213636.htm?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+sciencedaily%2Fplants_animals%2Fzoology+%28Zoology+News+–+ScienceDaily%29

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20140911-quest-for-the-worlds-lost-frogs