Brought back from the brink of extinction, rhino are once again under threat from ruthless poachers, many of them now fronting sophisticated criminal syndicates. But conservationists and scientists, with growing backing from government and big business, are fighting back

In the first six months of 2011, poachers butchered 200 South African rhino for their horns. Outrage mounted along with the alarming death toll, which seemed set to out-strip the 2010 total of 330. But something significant was happening: for a change, the poachers weren’t having it all their own way. So far this year, 20 poachers have paid for their crime with their lives.

It’s too early to say the tide has turned. However, there are indications that the poaching threat is, increasingly, being taken very seriously indeed, says a man intimately involved with rhino conservation. Appropriately, the Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency’s Dr Dave Balfour shared his thoughts with media around a campfire at the Great Fish River nature reserve during a 4x4 launch (see “Backing up the footsoldiers”).

According to Balfour, this war is fought on two fronts: firstly, look after and grow what you’ve got, and secondly, cut off criminals’ transport routes.

“We know that quite a lot of stuff goes out of Port Elizabeth; some stuff goes out of OR Tambo, and it goes to Dares Salaam, it goes to Cameroon… with organised crime, transport routes are established. Whether they are smuggling drugs or elephant tusks or abalone or rhino horn, or whatever it is, it’s the same transport routes that are being used.”

We’ve come a long way from the beginning of the 1900s, when there were about 80 000 black rhino in Africa, and fewer than 100 white rhino in Africa. The white rhino population had been all but wiped out. “It was basically the Great White Hunter, Hemingway and company, who came out from Europe and wanted to go on an adventure and shoot some animals.” White rhino are easy targets because they are more docile, and being grazers, they stand out in open grass. They also have bigger horns, which make more impressive trophies.

Those 100 or so that were left were all concentrated just inland of Lake St Lucia, in the Hluhluwe/Umfolozi area, where the Umfolozi park was established to protect white rhino. By 1970, the population had grown to between 700 and 800.

Fears of disease and poaching led to development of techniques for capturing, moving and relocating the animals on a huge scale – an average of one a day by the late 1970s. Today, there are more than 20 000 white rhino worldwide, of which 17 000 still are in South Africa.

But poaching is today removing a rhino a day. Most of those are white rhino.

“So there is a sense of having achieved fantastic success, but we are going through a bit of a wobble, and hopefully we can stabilise that,” says Balfour.

Black rhino have a very different history. Their huge South African population at the beginning of the 1970s had shrunk to below 3 000 by the 1990s as a result of hunting for trophies as well as “medicinal” uses.

“There are a whole lot of activities going on, trying to get rhino on to new populations and new land,” says Balfour. “That’s why you are fi nding that black rhino in private hands are becoming more and more important, because that’s where the available land is.”

He is keen to ensure that animals are kept in their natural habitat. It’s good for the habitat, and the animals themselves do better where they are naturally adapted. Not everybody shares that view. “In the 1980s there was different thinking around conservation; they released a whole lot of white rhino in here. And that’s caused problems in the natural habitat. So we’ve been removing them and sending them back where they came from. There are many white rhino owners down here who insist on keeping their animals. But as a State agency with broad biodiversity objectives and not a strictly commercial objective, we have taken that approach.”

But it’s really precarious at the moment. “Fortunately, guys going for the horn are targeting white rhino because they’ve got bigger horns, so they get bigger return on their investment. But this could shift easily.”

The Eastern Cape has got off lightly in the rhino war – five were found shot dead earlier this year – but Balfour notes that the dense thicket landscape can make carcasses hard to spot. In areas such as Zululand and Kruger, vultures are tell-tale signs of a carcass, but vultures have been poisoned out of the Eastern Cape. “We do have a microlight that gets flown whenever the wind is not bad,” he says.

“What is nice is that the country has mobilised a national Rhino Task Force, which has members from Special Investigations Unit, the military, the Hawks, Parks staff all following up and working together. The military has been brought into Kruger, and they have thrown real resources behind that. They’re also funding the DNA database and they’re funding a whole lot of other stuff. Maybe it could be more, but it’s moving in the right direction.”

He is enthusiastic about the DNA programme. “Whenever we ear-notch a rhino to mark it – and a lot of the black rhino are individually notched so you can see that’s number 6 or 7, or Joe, or whatever you want to call it, whenever that notching takes place, we take a DNA sample, put it in the relevant alcohol and send it away. It gets put in a database and the genetics get worked out.

“Down the line, if you get a horn that is recovered from an operation, and you can get a DNA sample, you can match it against the database and find out exactly where that horn came from. And that’s hugely useful in terms of investigation.”

Killing the Far East demand for rhino horn for medicinal purposes is part of the solution to the problem. Noted conservationist Ian Player has conceded that there’s no way of appealing to rationality in this, and has even suggested that we may have to talk about legalising trade in the horn.

Asked whether there were lessons to be learnt from the ivory trade, Balfour explained that the 1980s rhino and elephant hunt was primarily southern and eastern African. “A lot of that’s been brought under control. Both populations are under control there. Where it’s completely out of control is central Africa. A lot of it is DRC, but some of it is Cameroon, Gabon and those countries where the populations are plummeting. It’s an odd mix, because some of the hunting is just for meat, and not ivory.”

There has been a bizarre consequence. “Evolution is driven by a selection process; if you’ve got a trade that’s negative, you are not going to breed as well and you are going to become less and less and less numerous. And tusklessness: animals born without tusks are becoming more common in these areas where ivory hunts are taking place. If you go up to Tanzania now, you will see the consequences of the ‘80s, with these tuskless matriarchs, whereas if you go to the DRC you will see those that have survived. It’s kind of shifted around the continent a bit, but it’s still happening.”

What about poisoning the horn? Logistically and financially a non-starter, he says. “And then in 2½ years’ time it will be gone, because – like your fingernail – it grows out.”

And, of course, there’s the human rights issue. “If you know that people are going to eat something and you poison it, well, there’s complicity there.”

Yet it seems almost contradictory to speak of human rights when the two biggest threats to biodiversity on the planet are alien species and humans transforming the landscape.

“The problem is, we have a growing population of humans. You’ve got to feed them and give them housing. You’ve got to get the whole world economy working. Stopping that becomes politically nontenable. So we’ve got to look at other ways at this stage of doing it,” Balfour says.

“And these tiny little areas where we are working are contributing to that job. But if we don’t look beyond that, changing the way we manage the bigger landscape, we’re going to be in bigger trouble.”

Balfour the man
Square pegs in round holes everywhere can draw inspiration from how conservation came to be Dave Balfour’s focus.

On the road to a biology doctorate in botany and zoology, Balfour – currently with the Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency – has experienced regions as diverse as the Antarctic, the Kruger Park and central Africa.

But as a 25-year old civil engineer in 1984, he was stationed at a construction site on the Cape West Coast near Saldanha Bay. “One evening we were working late and there was a spectacular red sunset,” he recalls. What spoilt the idyllic scene was that he needed to drive a big 4x4 tractor across undisturbed fynbos – and hated having to do it.

The next day at lunch, idly thumbing through a Reader’s Digest he’d found in the site of. ce, he read about an elderly dentist bemoaning the fact that, at age 60, he was still doing what a 20-year old had decided he should do. The penny dropped. “That night, I wrote to UCT to start botany and zoology.”

He hadn’t even studied biology at school.

A question of colour
Black and white rhino are a bit like a zebra and a horse. They are similar, but different.

White rhinos are grazers; they eat only grass. Black rhinos are browsers; they eat only leaves and twigs. It’s reasonably certain that the ancestral animal was a black rhino – a browser.

Once grasslands as we know them developed about 11 million years ago, the white rhino, like the buffalo, evolved to take up that ecological niche. So the fact that these grasslands developed created a gap for all sorts of new species to evolve and come into existence. But, like with bovis – cattle – they have also become dumber. Things that just eat grass don’t lead a very challenging life.

If you look at a white rhino, it’s got eyes like a chameleon. It’s got no bifocal vision: they look out. And there’s no crossover, whereas although a black rhino also looks out, there is still some bifocal vision. And that’s got to do with depth perception and threedimensional perception. A white rhino just hangs its head and munches.

“The black rhino is the more curious animal of the two, coming to . nd out what the heck you are,” says Dr Dave Balfour. “Of course, for us it’s threatening, because there’s this massive horn in its nose. So that aggression that people talk about with the black rhino is real. Certainly I have experienced it – where you have to climb a tree very rapidly. The way we interpret it is as a more intelligent, curious animal, but it comes across as slightly aggressive.”

Backing up the footsoldiers
Big business is becoming involved in the fight against rhino poaching. Volkswagen, for instance, recently provided a R2-million boost to the campaign, in the form of six sponsored 4x4 double cabs as part of a partnership with the Wilderness Foundation, the pioneers and administrators of the Forever Wild Rhino Protection Initiative. Beneficiaries include SANPARKS, North West Parks and Tourism Board, Eastern Cape Parks and Tourism Agency, KZN Wildlife and Eastern Cape Private Game Reserves Association (Indalo). The Forever Wild Initiative is concerned with maintaining populations of free ranging rhino within State and privately managed conservation areas, supporting conservation agencies, and lobbying to address the issue of the illegal trade in rhino horn and other wildlife products. The Mazda Wildlife Fund has contributed over R26 million to conservation in the 20 years of its existence, with a recent rhino-specific campaign aimed at raising money for specialised night vision goggles supported by infrared lighting and firearm aiming capability for National Parks reaction teams.