Geoff stepped back from the rhino, his task now done for this one, but we were only just getting started. With nine more to go, it was going to be a long day. He glanced over at me; I was still holding the horn he had thrown to me. As he caught my eye, he read my thoughts.
‘You are wondering how anyone could mutilate such a beautiful animal for something similar to our fingernails? Or something like that?’
‘Something like that,’ I acknowledged. ‘This must taste disgusting, and you’ve got to be pretty stupid to think it has any medicinal properties. I just don’t get it.’
‘It is desperation and three thousand years of tradition tied up in one. It’s impossible to counter, and they don’t have a clue about the brutality involved in obtaining it. Then at this end, the guys doing the dirty work are on the breadline, struggling to feed themselves and their families. Someone comes along and offers them more money than they will ever otherwise see, for some information or one night of work. It’s no wonder they jump at it. We can condemn them, gasping in disgust and shuddering in disbelief that a fellow human could be so callous and brutal, while we lie in our comfortable beds, watch TV in our cosy homes, and shop in food halls stacked with every food choice known to man. We don’t know the desperation of wondering where the next meal will come from. For them the choice is simple, it’s “the animal or me”. For every poacher killed, there are a hundred more lining up to take his place.’
It was a perspective I hadn’t considered before. It was humbling, in a way, given what he had seen and experienced. Suddenly the problem was opening up to me in a way I hadn’t understood before. I felt ashamed as a foreigner to be coming in with all my preconceptions and prejudices, ignorant of the nuances of the problem. It was an abhorrent illegal trade that was bringing a species to the brink of extinction, there was no question about it, but there was also never going to be a simple solution. There were so many layers to the problem and I was only just starting to understand them.
‘It’s the depraved, malicious, pitiless, bloodthirsty, inhuman gang leaders that run the cartels that I want to get. String ’em up by their balls and let’s see how they like being slashed around and shot at before having a chunk hacked out of their face.’ The emotion was raw and the words just splurged out. It wasn’t pleasant to hear, but I felt the same visceral emotion – and I hadn’t even confronted the reality in the flesh.
Three years later I was back in South Africa. The morning had begun rather sedately with a relaxing breakfast; there was no tight schedule, nothing much on the agenda for the morning. We were a mixed group of seven vets from America, the UK and South Africa. It was to be a morning of sharing research, experiences and knowledge. Half an hour in, though, it all changed. Derik received the phone call he always knew might come, but had hoped never would.
Sabi, the three-year-old white rhino that he and Cobus had rescued and nursed back to health after it had been shot while his mother was poached, had himself been poached in the night.
Sabi had been just weeks old when rangers had found him trying to nuzzle the mutilated body of his mother. He was in a bad way, having been shot three times. But despite the poachers’ efforts to kill or scare him off, he had remained by his mother’s side as she had been peppered with machine-gun bullets and slashed across her back and legs with machetes. She then had her horn hacked off before being left to die in utter agony.
At just weeks old he was completely helpless, so when Cobus arrived on the scene he knew Sabi’s only chance of survival was 24/7 care. They took him back to the vets’ base and nurtured him back to health, feeding him every few hours and often sleeping with him to keep him company. Incredibly, and against the odds, he made a full recovery and grew well.
At six months of age he was sufficiently independent that they felt it best to relocate him to a secure facility where he could be socialized with other rhinos. It was here, two and a half years later, that Sabi once again had to experience the callous, depraved brutality of human greed, and this time it cost him his life.
As Derik hung up the phone, his shock and disbelief were evident; he struggled to find the words as he fought back the tears. He had experienced the realities of rhino poaching countless times, but this had a personal element to it. He reached into his top pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and turned to walk out of the room as he fumbled in his pocket for his lighter. The atmosphere in the room, which only moments before had been light-hearted, full of jokes and laughter, was now an eerie silence. We exchanged glances, but none of us could speak for shock, and anyway, there didn’t seem to be anything to say. We heard Derik’s phone ring again from the veranda outside the meeting room and then the distinctive guttural sounds of Afrikaans. The smell of cigarette smoke now permeated the room. We remained in silence, each immersed in our own thoughts. When the phone call had ended and the cigarette extinguished, Derik rejoined us.
‘They want us to go and help with the post-mortem,’ he announced. ‘The police and forensics need to examine the scene and gather evidence initially, and then it will be over to us. I warn you, it won’t be pleasant, but this is reality. We’ll leave in half an hour.’
The journey was a bizarre experience. Large portions of it were conducted in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts as we gazed out the window at the passing African landscape. Conversation, when it did come, ranged from trivial small talk to an emotive discussion about how to deter poachers, protect rhinos and whether legalizing the trade in rhino horn was the solution or whether we were just being naive and the battle was already lost.
Three years before, I had been convinced that legalizing the trade of rhino horns was the answer. Allowing people to farm them like any other animal product would flood the market, reduce the price, and thus reduce the incentive to poach them. It seemed a painfully simple solution to a dire problem. If asked, I would have invoked the regulations implemented by CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) in the 1970s that promoted crocodile farming – a system of captive breeding that sought to prevent crocodile ranching and the theft of eggs from the wild, and how this brought the Nile crocodile back from the brink of extinction. If it worked for crocodiles, wouldn’t it work for rhinos, too? As is often the way, though, the more ignorant you are, the simpler the solution can appear to be.