Experts came up with a Wild West idea ...

No, we don't want pictures like this ...

DO YOU WANT TO SAFE BAD HUMANS OR NICE RHINOS? That’s the question in a nutshell. Or the other way round: Set man-killers against animal- killers and pay them generously – or do you want to try to protect wildlife the guaranteed useless, old-fashioned way? I heard this alternative from my friends, the experts in the bush. They complain that the de-horning of a single rhino costs app. US$ 5000. An action without sense: The animals are handicapped, the poachers kill them anyway out of revenge („De-horning will not help!“) or for the material in the stumps, which – they claim – is still precious enough for the (illegal) market. Solution? „Print ‘Wanted Posters’ of the known poachers, offer US$ 5000 dead or alive!“, cried one game warden, who risks his health and life every week in the battle against the rhino killers. And if the poachers are not known? „Offer bounty! Let the ‘Bounty Hunters’ roam around in the area where rhinos still live.“ But would’t they kill innocents for such a fortune and claim they were poachers? „Oho“, laughs another friend, „they are all known! Either to their neighbors, the authorities – and to the other poachers. And if not: Watch who follows the rhinos, get them, bring them in and cash the bounty! And, by the way: They are easily recognizable by their guns, snares, saws and axes.“ My friend Tony Moore, „The Legend“ from Vic Falls, promises: „This way the rhinos are hundred percent protected. Much better than the National Parks Services can. And if a poachers looses his life? It probably safes the lives of many rhinos …!“ Wild West in Africa – tough, dangerous, illegal, murderous, but probably successful. From the point of view of the rhinos …