The poaching is driven by a demand for rhino horns in southeast Asia that has grown nearly insatiable; so much so, experts say, that any living rhino - anywhere in the world - is now at risk of being killed.
Perhaps no rhino death illustrates that threat more forcefully than the killing of Vince, a 4-year-old male white rhino who was slaughtered this week inside his enclosure at a zoo outside Paris. The rhino - discovered by his keeper at the Thoiry Zoological Park on Tuesday - now holds the ominous distinction of likely being the first rhino to be killed by poachers inside a zoo, experts said.
"This is the first time we've heard of it," said Crawford Allen, senior director of TRAFFIC North America, a regional office of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). "It's certainly the first time it's happened in Europe.
"It's an incredibly shocking and distressing occurrence," he added. "It's also a game-changer for zoos. They've woken up today and realized their world has changed if they have live rhinos in their collection."
In a statement posted on Facebook, the Thoiry Zoological Park, which is 30 miles west of Paris, said its "entire staff is extremely shocked" by Vince's killing. The animal was born in a zoo in the Netherlands in 2012 and arrived at Thoiry in March 2015, the zoo said.
The zoo pinned the killing on criminals who forced open an outer gate outside the rhinoceros building overnight. The intruders then forced open a second metal door and broke open "an intermediate inner door" that allowed them access to the animal lodges, the zoo said.
Police told Reuters that Vince was shot three times in the head. One of the animal's horns was removed, probably with a chain saw, the zoo said.
"His second horn was only partially cut, which suggests that the criminals were disturbed or that their equipment proved defective," the zoo said. "The other two white rhinoceros living in Thoiry, Gracie aged 37 and Bruno aged 5 years, escaped the massacre and are safe."
"Vince was found this morning by [his] caretaker, who is very attached to the animals she cares for, and is deeply affected," the zoo added. "This odious act was perpetrated despite the presence of five members of the zoological staff living on the spot and surveillance cameras."
Just over a decade ago, a rhino horn was just a rhino horn - an innocuous piece of animal body armor made of keratin, the same type of protein that makes up human hair and fingernails. Now a rhino horn is something else entirely for a new generation of wealthy buyers in China and Vietnam: a highly-coveted status symbol and a cancer-curing miracle drug and aphrodisiac whose legend is rooted in pseudoscience.
Depending on the species and the market, experts said, rhino horns are worth more than their weight in gold. Protected wildlife is the fourth largest form of criminal traffic in the world behind drugs, counterfeiting and human trafficking, according to the World Wildlife Fund.
Global trade in rhino horn is banned by a U.N. convention, and its sale is illegal in France, according to Reuters, but as little as a kilo of rhino horn was worth about $54,000 on the black market in 2015.
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