Can military-style tactics help save the African rhino?

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This was published 5 years ago

Can military-style tactics help save the African rhino?

These magnificent beasts are facing annihilation from ruthless poachers, but environmentalists hope that military-style operations to move the animals across borders may help save the species.

By Todd Pitock

A blindfolded rhino calf prior to translocation.

A blindfolded rhino calf prior to translocation.Credit: Jason Florio

As the sun drifts down on the rolling hills in the heartland of South Africa, Manie Van Niekerk sits with his fingers clasped in his lap. At 52, he wears his hair cropped, which along with a solid physique gives the impression of a man who cannot be easily shaken. But now he looks mournful. People will be gathering at his farm to take away his 32 rhinoceros the next morning. He doesn't want to part with them. "You fall in love with the rhino," he tells me. "You get a lot of joy looking at them. They are dinosaurs. You can look at them and imagine the world before. People think they're clumsy, but they're actually very graceful. They move like ballerinas."

Van Niekerk makes his living growing maize and potatoes on a 23,000-hectare farm that has been in his family since 1926. But he's always loved game, and in 2009 he acquired another 5000 hectares to collect a covey of African antelopes – sable, kudu and eland. In 2013, he added rhino. It was just for his own pleasure.

By then, the poachers' war on rhinos was in full fury, topping 1000 animal deaths a year for the first time. But they were hunting mostly in Kruger National Park and the areas around South Africa's eastern border with Mozambique. Van Niekerk wasn't concerned for his property, in the Free State province deep in the country's interior. Then anti-poaching responses improved and the price of rhino horn kept soaring, so the poachers began expanding into new territory.

They hit Van Niekerk's place for the first time in January 2017, again the next month, and a third time in April. They would wait for a full moon, a pattern so set that it has become known as a "poachers' moon"; Van Niekerk's sleep patterns in response waxed and waned with the lunar cycle. He'd lie waiting for his phone to ring or feeling haunted by gruesome memories of an 18-year-old female that had been mutilated with an axe. Blood still gushed from where they'd hacked off the horn clear down to her facial plate and torn her open. Her three-month-old calf was burrowed into her side. "It was five or six hours before we could take him to a rehabilitation centre," Van Niekerk recalls. "He just lay next to his mummy, moaning, and didn't move. It was pathetic."

When poachers came again last June, Van Niekerk's security people intercepted them. A firefight broke out, and they wounded two poachers, who left a trail of blood as Van Niekerk's guards gave chase, eventually capturing five of the seven, whom they handed over to police. Van Niekerk had had enough. "I couldn't keep putting my people at risk," he says. "I couldn't go to their families next time and tell them it wasn't the poachers but one of our guys who got shot." He adds: "I am angry, and I know tomorrow when they take the rhinos away I will be even more angry. But I also know I will sleep better when the rhinos are gone."

Africa's rhino populations have shrunk and expanded before, peaking at an estimated 500,000 in the year 1900. There are two species, white and black, with the white divided into northern and southern subspecies. (Three other rhino species exist, found in India, Nepal, Bhutan and Indonesia.) Van Niekerk's rhinos are southern whites. And as the white isn't white, the black isn't black, either. Both are grey. The northern white rhino has been reduced to its last two members, both females; the last male died in March at age 45 at a reserve in Kenya.

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Since 2008, poachers have slaughtered almost 7300 African rhinos, an especially tragic number given that its horn can be removed without killing the animal. Unlike an elephant's tusk, which is bone, horn is keratin, the same material as fingernails and hair, and it can grow back if it's cut above the germinal layer where it connects to the facial plate. Nevertheless, Africa's rhino population – which has been brought back from the brink of extinction before – is down to about 21,000 white and 5000 black rhinos. South Africa's game reserves and farms like Van Niekerk's hold 80 per cent of them.

The goal is to repopulate them where they have been decimated, in countries including Rwanda, Zambia and Botswana. In May, Chad airlifted in six rhinos after an absence of 50 years. It doesn't always work out. An internal relocation in Kenya of 11 rhinos from Nairobi and Lake Nakuru national parks to Tsavo East National Park, meant to start a new population in the area, ended tragically in July after nine rhinos drank saltwater and died from dehydration. A tenth was killed by lions.

"The main reason for moving rhinos is strategic," says Richard Emslie, scientific adviser for the International Union for Conservation of Nature. "You have to have more and different baskets to withstand poaching. You manage rhinos like an investment share portfolio: you don't want all your investments in one place."

The risk comes from demand in Asia, where poached horn is pulverised for use in fake medicines or fashioned into ornaments and objects, a part of the illicit trade in endangered animals worth billions. An average white rhino horn weighs about four kilograms. Brittle parts, ground up for potions, sell for $US10 a gram; the dark core used to fashion trinkets gets $US180 a gram – more than the price of gold bullion – according to Phillip Hattingh, who investigated the market in his documentary, The Hanoi Connection. A poaching team receives as much as $US10,000 per horn. Given their limited financial options, that sum is worth risking their lives for, or the lives of anyone who gets in their way.

Occasionally, the tables turn. Last month, at least three suspected rhino poachers who broke into Sibuya Game Reserve in South Africa were eaten by lions.

Rhinos are killed in South Africa at a rate of three a day. "I really never enjoyed putting rhino into boxes and sending them anywhere," says Dave Cooper, whose job as vet of KwaZulu-Natal's provincial parks requires him to perform rhino post-mortems, and who plays a vital role in translocations including this one. "I felt sorry for them. The thing that has changed now is, when I put them into a box, I'm saving them."

A vet prepares to tranquillise a rhino.

A vet prepares to tranquillise a rhino.Credit: Jason Florio

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The conservation community is riven by differences: political rivalries, personality clashes, competition for resources and recognition, and disagreements over game management, tourism and hunting. The most contentious issues concerning rhinos, for example, are whether to dehorn them and what to do with those horns. Opponents say it deprives the animals of their primary means of defence against other animals, mutilates the animal, and that legal trade sends a mixed message to customers in Asia even as conservationists are trying to blunt demand by stigmatising horn buying. Proponents say it deters poachers, as it lowers their profits, and that the trade is the only way to ensure that rhinos are more valuable alive than dead. A decision by South Africa's High Court, in April 2017, to lift a 30-year-old moratorium on trading horn only intensified the debate. (International trading is still banned.)

More broadly, African conservation faces an unavoidable conflict between the needs of humans and animals. The United Nations forecasts Africa's population of 1.3 billion people may grow to 2.5 billion by 2050. Its governments have their hands full with providing roads and schools, hospitals and food – essentials for which some impassioned wildlife lovers have little sympathy. "Africa doesn't have an animal problem!" one wildlife executive tells me. "It has a people problem. We don't need to cull animals. We need to cull people."

When I repeat the comment to Les Carlisle, an old conservation hand who helps manage the translocation of Van Niekerk's rhinos, he bridles. "Absurd," he says.

"On the whole, conservation has done absolutely nothing for communities around them. It's a paternalistic relationship. We know this: When there's benefit to the community, wildlife crime is minimal." Time is growing short, he says. "If we don't change what we're doing, it'll be game over within 10 years, at least for the rhinos. They'll be gone."

The attempt to move Van Niekerk's rhinos has been organised by Rhinos Without Borders, a partnership formed by Dereck and Beverly Joubert of Great Plains Conservation, and Joss Kent, CEO of South Africa-based travel company &Beyond. Since 2015, Rhinos Without Borders and &Beyond have raised $US6 million to acquire and relocate 100 rhino and then monitor them for three years. This move will bring the total to 77.

It will be the largest to date, in three stages over three weeks, bringing Van Niekerk's 32 rhinos to the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Another eight will be flown from &Beyond's Phinda Private Game Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal. The window of opportunity is narrow.

Any day the scorching heat, followed by torrential rains, will make the road through the swamps impassable and spoil the opportunity. And no one knows whether politics will interfere or if poachers will come again. So when the permits come through in September 2017, the relocation team jumps into action.

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Manie Van Niekerk with a horn taken before translocation.

Manie Van Niekerk with a horn taken before translocation.Credit: Jason Florio

The assembly at Van Niekerk's farm includes veterinarians, a doctoral candidate doing research, a helicopter pilot, drivers, and game capturers who by necessity have become expert at managing the paperwork for the permitting and export process. "We've worked it out," Carlisle says. "When the weight of the paper is equal to the weight of the rhino, they'll let us go ahead." After a meeting about logistics, they break out coolers of beer and light up a fire pit to roast a quantity of beef and the local sausage known as boerewors.

I arrive with a pair of security guards to scout the ranch for places that might be vulnerable to attack. The team has hired private security for the South African leg of the trip: they don't trust police, whom they believe to have corrupt elements.

The truck has auxiliary lights, spotlights and light bars on the front and sides. It has a radio, an on-board camera and an arsenal including semi-automatic rifles.

The guards wear flak jackets and sidearms. Trained in conservation, they've had to learn vehicle interception, bush tracking and combat. "We've had to become paramilitary," says Brett, who asks me not to use his surname because of threats from poachers.

We drive the farm's perimeter in the darkness. When we return to the farmhouse we hear that Van Niekerk's security people out in the field had been reaching for their rifles before someone thought to call and let them know that the vehicle coming toward them was us.

Transporting the rhinos by truck from Van Niekerk's farm to northern Botswana takes more than 24 hours.

Transporting the rhinos by truck from Van Niekerk's farm to northern Botswana takes more than 24 hours.

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We arrive at sunrise at the 1000-hectare enclosure where Van Niekerk has penned his rhinos. The day's task is to get 15 of the 32 rhinos into separate metal containers, load the containers onto two flatbed trucks, and hit the road in a convoy including the flatbeds, the security guards' truck and a pair of minivans. "I'm always nervous," says Grant Tracy, a game capturer managing the project's logistics. "I've done it many times, and I'm nervous every time. The older you get, the more you realise how much can go wrong and how it can all spin out of control very quickly."

The capture begins at dawn. An R44, a nimble helicopter, its doors removed, hovers just above the rhinos, and one of the vets uses a compressed-air dart gun to deliver a dose of M99, a sedative thousands of times stronger than morphine. It hits a female rhino's rump with a thwack; a moment later she stands still, stunned and quivering. Her eyes, tiny in her massive head, dart back and forth. Once a blindfold is placed over her eyes, she relaxes. A half-dozen workers tip her onto her side, bringing up a puff of dust. A researcher takes blood samples, to measure and compare stress levels later. It falls to someone else to put on a plastic sleeve the length of his arm and extract a fist-size stool sample. Another notches the rhino's ears – a form of identification.

All the while, workers keep their palms on her flank, her face and the hump at the nape of her neck, to reassure her. I step in to touch her. She's a mass of textures. Her back is rough. The armour on the top side of her trunk is thick, latticed in a pattern of rectangles sweeping down to the underbelly, which is full and soft. Heavy folds fall over her legs, which look jammed in, like pillars holding up a bulbous building.

Van Niekerk wrests open her mouth. Her upper lip is velvety, hot and tender. There's a big, rough ridge along her upper lip, which feels thick, and inside is another ridge of rough bumps; the only teeth are molars. Her ears are erect; the skin behind them as soft as an ancient and well-oiled baseball mitt. Her tail, so small, looks better suited to a piglet. And then, of course, there's the defining feature, the object of so much grief: the horns. White rhinos have two, a long one above the mouth and a smaller one between the eyes. (Black rhinos also have two, but front and back can vary in proportion to each other.)

Van Niekerk takes a hacksaw and removes the bigger horn. It has to come off before the rhino goes into the container, or she might break it and injure herself. The stump feels heavy, and as smooth as petrified rock. They mark a number on the hide to keep track and push her back on her feet. They rope each of her hind legs and leash her head, and push and pull, and make judicious use of a cattle prod as they manoeuvre her towards the metal container.

The rhino is still sedated, and she high-steps even though her four legs aren't quite in sync. At the edge of the gangplank – the last step before the metal container – she swings her head and sloughs off the capturers, who regather, tug, heave and hoe. Just as they get to the lip of the door and can see the end of things, she sidesteps it and starts taking big strides, as if to break into a gallop. Amid a lot of shouting, I take cover behind a pickup truck until the capturers rein her in; this time she disappears into the container. From above someone releases the metal door, which drops like a guillotine. Reaching through an opening in the top of the container, someone removes the blindfold.

Twenty minutes later, as the crew works on the next rhino, we get word that she has busted out. The container's front door was missing a metal pin to secure it. The crew has to start all over again with her. They repeat the process another 14 times. A loader lifts the containers onto the flatbeds, and the other vehicles form a convoy. At 3pm, after nine hours in the field, we start the journey to Botswana. The convoy proceeds north at 80 kilometres an hour. The schedule has us reaching the Botswana border by dusk. We arrive just before 10pm, when it closes for the night.

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Our private security force peels away, and Botswana Defence Force personnel take their place. As we set out on the Trans-Kalahari Highway, the change in the security posture is striking. In South Africa, security relies on inconspicuousness and discretion. Here, it's about boldness. When the convoy stops to refuel, soldiers spill out of their vehicles and fan out with their rifles. There are no threats, though, only a handful of men and women in the modern desert oasis of a petrol station convenience store who seem happy for the break in the humdrum.

The temperature has dropped, and everyone reaches for fleece. One of the veterinarians climbs onto the tops of the containers to check on the rhinos, who protest their confinement by banging their bodies loudly against the sides of the containers.

In preparation for the long drive, vets deliver a sedative much stronger than morphine.

In preparation for the long drive, vets deliver a sedative much stronger than morphine.Credit: Jason Florio

Botswana lost its rhinos to poachers twice before, in the '70s and the '80s, but it has been re-establishing the population since the early 2000s. Its former president, Ian Khama, who stepped down on April 1, committed his military to protecting the species, even stationing anti-poaching units in the bush. He also established Rhino Conservation Botswana to co-ordinate a growing menagerie of conservation and safari companies trying to protect rhinos. His successor, Mokgweetsi Masisi, has pledged to continue the rhino conservation policies.

The Texas-sized country has just 2.25 million people, mostly on its eastern flank. The rest is a barely populated wilderness stretching across the Kalahari Desert, the Makgadikgadi Pan – a series of salt pans the size of Belgium – and the fertile, paradisal Okavango Delta. Its austere beauty can leave you slack-jawed, and tourism is now its second-biggest industry, after mining. Botswana has tried to build the industry with the approach Carlisle describes: lodge operators pay concession fees directly into a community trust for education, health, farming and other projects.

But rural communities and wildlife still have conflicts. There is a long-running dispute with the nomadic indigenes, the Khoisan, who have interpreted the hunting ban as an attack on their way of life. And the military's aggressiveness has other critics. In an interview with British actor Tom Hardy for the 2013 documentary Poaching Wars, Tshekedi Khama, the ex-president's brother and the country's minister for the environment, wildlife and tourism, acknowledged Botswana had a "shoot to kill" policy and described the extrajudicial execution of suspected wildlife thieves. Poachers, he said, "should start carrying their IDs so that we can notify their next of kin. Yes, God will judge the poachers but it's up to us to arrange the meeting." But its western neighbour, Namibia, claims 30 of its nationals have died as a result, including fishermen accused of "poaching fish".

Some of Manie Van Niekerk’s 32 rhinos prior to being taken to Botswana.

Some of Manie Van Niekerk’s 32 rhinos prior to being taken to Botswana.Credit: Jason Florio

Back on the road, we can see only as far as the spray of the headlights. By noon – 21 hours after we've left Van Niekerk's farm – we reach Maun, the gateway to the Okavango Delta. We have only about 50 kilometres to go. Loaders transfer the containers to smaller, more nimble trucks. We enter where the delta meets the Kalahari, bordered on two sides by rivers and laced by streams that create little islands where whole civilisations of termites have built mounds that peak like ziggurats. The trucks plunge into pools of water that rise above the wheels, above the headlights, to the base of the cab doors.

We arrive at the release site by nightfall. The rhinos are darted and led out of the containers, tipped onto their sides again to have more blood drawn, their ears notched to conform to the Botswana system, their ankles belted with GPS monitors. There are nearly 100 people present, among them the Jouberts, who envisioned this project, and Rhino Conservation Botswana director Map Ives, who was a prime mover in the first efforts to repopulate rhinos here in the early 2000s. They roll up their sleeves and get to work.

Seven rhino bulls lie still on the ground, like big grey boulders. The four pairs of cow-calves will spend the night in a boma, a little stockade. They are given the antidote to the sedative and their blindfolds are peeled off. Then, one by one, each rhino stirs and stands up. A set of car headlights silhouettes their grey hides. The rhinos sniff heavily, a sound accompanied by the steady mating calls of painted reed frogs.

Then, Van Niekerk's rhinos take their first steps on their own in more than 40 hours. They lumber, heavy-limbed, beyond the beams of headlights towards a forest of darkness, and disappear into it.

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age.

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