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Two South African men captured this weekend with 167 rhinoceros horns, one of the largest recorded bins believed to be destined for Asia, appeared in court on Monday, police said.
Clive John Melville, 57, and Petrus Stephanus Steyn, 61, both from Port Elizabeth, in the south of the country, face charges of rhinoceros horn trafficking.
The two men will remain in detention until April 26, when they will ask for bail, said Brigadier Hangwani Mulaudzi, spokesman for an elite police unit who was investigating specialized crimes known as Hawk.
They were arrested Saturday in the area of the Hartbeespoort Dam, north of Pretoria, following a council that a car was carrying rhinoceros horns.
Police said the rhino horns worth a "substantial sum of money" were destined for markets in Southeast Asia.
The demand for rhinoceros horn is mainly fueled by Chinese and Vietnamese consumers, where some practitioners of traditional medicine are advertising this miracle ingredient.
In reality, rhinoceros horn contains little more than keratin, the same protein that makes human hair and nails.
Nevertheless, the horn can reach $ 60,000 per kilogram in Asia, fueling lucrative transnational criminal networks that have decimated rhinoceros populations in recent decades.
South Africa, home to about 80% of the world's population of rhinos, was the hardest hit.
By 2018, 769 rhinos have been poached just in South Africa. More than 7,100 animals have been slaughtered in the last decade.
The country is also home to the largest rhino farms in the world.
In 2017, John Hume, a private rhino breeder, held an online rhinoceros auction after South Africa's highest court lifted an eight-year moratorium on domestic rhinoceros horn trade. .
Breeders harvest the horns by tranquilizing and cutting animals – a technique they claim is humane and keep poachers away.
The photographs distributed in local media after the seizure of the weekend show horns bearing weight and other indications that appear to be registration numbers.
"This suggests that the horns come from some stock, perhaps even private," AFF Julian Rademeyer, project manager at TRAFFIC, the international wildlife trade network, told AFP.
The way the horns were cut "seems to have been cut professionally with an electric saw – again, this could indicate the possibility that some horns come from dog-eared rhinos and not necessarily from pooched animals," Rademeyer added.
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