Rhinos, Lions and Profits-Selling Out Our Wild with Pieter Kat

Our Wild World

Rapid changes to our entire earth and our wild species and heritage is happening the world over: from climate change to regulations to law enforcement and models that unfortunately end up promoting continued illegal wildlife trade. With my guest Dr. Pieter Kat, we discuss the recent headlines of a legalized national trade in rhino horn within S. Africa and the ramifications and consequences, as yet still unknown, of the online auction of rhino horn for private use while at the same time it is still illegal via CITES for any country to import horn. We also draw parallels between the privatized large-scale farming/breeding of lions, and a ‘conservation model’ that is based solely upon profit through utilization rather than species survival in the wild, and discuss the facelift that is urgently needed for conservation of the wild as a whole to ensure not just the ‘big and furry’ survive, but biodiversity as a whole in the future of earth, and the necessity of protected wild places.