RICHARD FREEMAN: RHINOS KILLED ON AN UNPRECEDENTED SCALE IN AFRICA

Rhino conservation suffered a disastrous year in 2010 with over 333 rhinos being killed in South Africa alone; 323 whites and 10 blacks. It would seem that 2011 is shaping up to be bad as well. In May poachers chased a female white rhino off a cliff and then took her horn - the following day her calf was found lying next to its dead mother.

Poachers are now part of a criminal syndicate and come armed with helicopters, machine guns and powerful drugs. The police often know who is involved, but seem powerless to stop them. Out of spite, poachers often kill even those rhinos that have been de-horned by conservationists. All this for a keratin horn with no medical powers whatsoever beyond the backward superstitions of various people, mostly living in the Far East.

Now the army have been deployed. The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) have been asked by South African National Parks (SANParks) to play a strategic role in their protection, especially the Kruger National Park. The SANDF were deployed to the Kruger, where the park borders with Mozambique and Zimbabwe, at the beginning of April 2011. Hopefully, they will employ a shoot-to-kill policy with poachers. If a few of their helicopters are blasted out of the sky, others may become too frightened to take up poaching in the first place.

Meanwhile, in the Masai Mara game reserve in Kenya, two of the reserve’s three white rhinos have been poached despite supposedly being under 24-hour watch. The third rhino has since been moved to Nairobi National Park where he joined 11 others currently living there that were brought in last year, during a similar exercise from Lake Nakuru National Park. The translocation will enhance and increase the genetic breeding structure of the current rhino population at the park.

If rhinos are to be saved we need to be more proactive. We need sanctions on countries that deal in rhino horn. And the dealers should be targeted with extreme methods. Once again, this might induce such fear that no one would dare deal in rhino horn again. We can bang on about re-educating the misguided (or in other words evil, greedy, stupid) but so far it has done little good. If we cut out the dealers, there is no one to pay the poacher, and if we cut out the poachers, there is no one to kill the rhinos.