Schäl sick

You don’t need to have lived in Africa or ever seen one in the wild, to get sad when coming across a pictures like this: 

What a magnificent animal, what a gentle creature – slaughtered and driven to extinction for nothing but superstitious believes. Despite vast evidence that rhino horn, which is essentially keratin, has no positive medical benefits at all, rhinos are being poached like never before:

With that in mind, I was surprised when I came across an article stating that “ten people had been held in China for hunting a panda to sell its fur and meat”.   

The news sparked an outcry on Chinese social media, where people expressed their anger and condemned the crime. The largely endangered pandas are seen as a national treasure of China and its spiritual symbol. Hunting pandas is strictly prohibited and is punished with a minimum sentence of 10 years in jail and in severe cases, potentially even a death sentence.

Clearly Chinese people understand what an animal can mean to a country and why it should be protected. Why do they remain so short- and narrow-sighted to see that what the panda is for them, the rhino is for Africa?

PS: In my hometown Cologne, the term Schäl Sick refers to the part of town on the eastern side of the river Rhein. It was allegedly first used to describe horses, who wore blinders to stop them from looking in a certain direction – historically to the eastern side of the Rhein.