Animal Advocates Watchdog

Baby Rhino Falls Victim to Military Style Poachers *PIC*

Baby Rhino Falls Victim to Military Style Poachers
The mother of a baby rhino was left to die after poachers drugged her and sawed off her horn.

The plight of a baby rhino whose mother was left to die after poachers drugged it and sawed off its horn has highlighted a resurgent threat from criminal poaching gangs in South Africa.
Bewildered, hungry and confused, the nine month-old calf was found staggering through scrub a few hundred yards from the mutilated corpse of its mother at the Krugersdorp Nature Reserve, in Gauteng province.

The adult animal was one of many victims of a dramatic spike in poaching driven by a surge in demand in Asia, where rhino horn is held to have medicinal properties.
The poachers drugged the beast, rather than killing it outright, as that is a more efficient way of incapacitating it before removing the horn. The rhino then bled to death, its calf surviving the poaching gang only because its horn was yet to grow.

“I don’t mind admitting there were tears in my eyes when I saw her lying there,” said Japie Mostert, the veteran ranger at the Krugersdorp Nature Reserve who found the dead animal.

The mother was the last adult rhino left in the small game park, which has been ruthlessly targeted by a new breed of poachers using sophisticated, military-style methods. Whereas “traditional” poachers relied on simple snares, now they hunt for their prey using helicopters, GPS locators, and dart guns.

Last year 122 rhinos were slaughtered for their horns in South Africa, and this year that number is already on track to be doubled.

Conservationists are at a loss over how to respond.

“We are facing an entirely new type of threat,” Cathy Dean, of Save the Rhino International, said.

“Where we once had to deal with poachers wearing flip-flops and using a home-made snare, we are now faced with criminal gangs deploying GPS devices, night-vision equipment and foot soldiers to track rhinos for days. Highly-trained operatives, possibly ex-soldiers, are then being flown into parks by helicopter, and armed with specialised veterinary drugs and darting guns, chainsaws and automatic weapons. Who is possibly resourced to deal with that?”

If the rate of poaching continues unchecked, the number of animals being poached will exceed the rate of natural population growth within two years.

Despite an international ban, more than 1,500 rhino horns have been traded in the past three years, feeding demand from two main markets: the Middle East and the Far East. But increasingly strong links between Africa and the Far East mean that supply route has become easier and less risky.

At pounds 45,000 per kilogram, the horns – weighing, on average, 7 kilograms each – are now worth more than their weight in gold, and there is no shortage of foot soldiers willing to work for a share of the profits. Even the world-famous Kruger National Park, which has well-resourced rangers, has fallen prey to the poaching gangs, but it is increasingly the smaller, less secure, private parks, like Krugersdorp, that are most vulnerable.

The demand from Vietnam – where a cabinet minister recently claimed his cancer had been cured by a potion containing ground rhino horn – is particularly fierce. Hanoi-based kingpins, allegedly with highly-paid contacts at the very highest levels of South African ministries and conservation groups, dominate the illicit trade.

An investigation by the South African national broadcaster last year captured a Vietnamese diplomat on camera illegally buying rhino horn in front of the embassy building in the capital, Pretoria.

The female diplomat was later recalled to Hanoi, without prosecution.

More than 90 per cent of Africa’s rhinos live in South Africa, where conservation methods have achieved great success since the 1970s. But this success has now put the species under threat.

“South Africa is the last frontier for the rhino,” said Pelham Jones, of the Private Rhino Owners’ Association. “They have been more or less shot out of the rest of the continent, so poachers are focusing all their considerable efforts on us. We really are under siege.”

Radical measures being suggested include legalising the rhino horn trade again, and using horns from rhino that have died a natural death, or have had them removed in a controlled process by rangers.

At least one game park is now running a project for “eco-tourists”, charging them to help dart the animals and carve off horns, thus making them valueless to poachers.

But Mr Jones believes this strategy not only makes a rhino more vulnerable, by being left without horns to defend itself, but also risks the country’s popularity for viewing the famous “Big Five’ – elephant, lion, leopard, buffalo and rhino.

“People don’t come to South Africa to see the Big Four, or even the Big Four-and-a-Half – by which I mean the rhinos without their horns. The rhino is part of our South African heritage. We have brought them back from extinction once, and we must not allow for the risk of that situation again.”

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PHOTO: The last rhinoceros cow in Krugersdorp park, South Africa, bled to death on Wednesday after poachers hacked off her horn. Photograph: Reuters

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