““We take wool from sheep, why not horn from rhinos?” he asks one afternoon, sitting in the office of one of his farms as an albino parrot named Sebastian nuzzles his ear. “If you cut the horn about three inches above its base, it will grow back in two years. That means there is a never ending supply of rhino horn if we’re smart enough to keep the bloody animals alive.”
Nearly once a week Hume’s game manager and a veterinarian, observed by a wildlife official, anesthetize one of his rhinos and remove its two horns with a power saw. Twenty minutes later the animal is back grazing, and the horns, implanted with microchips, are on their way to a bank safe. Hume refuses to say how much horn he has accumulated since he began harvesting in 2002, but a conservative estimate would put its value at tens of millions of dollars.
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