What What What?
What is the run? Bloomberg BusinessWeek contributor Jonathan Franklin rode along with park rangers in South Africa. They spend their days and nights trying to stop poachers who kill endangered rhinos for their horns. A single rhinoceros horn can be worth forty thousand dollars or more on the black market. Ground into powder. It's used for traditional medicines in China and Vietnam, or kept intact a contraband trophy for wealthy
people to put on display. If it keeps up like this, poachers will wipe out rhinos altogether.
I would ask them, you know, how long have you been a ranger? And they would say thirty years. And I remember one of the guys said, when I first became a ranger, we were always so worried because the animals were thirsty. And I said, and now and he said, we've got guns. We're more like soldiers. It's gone from being like a joy to conserve the to a war to protect them.
But keeping up with poachers is not easy, so the rangers are now taking an unexpected approach. I'm West Kesova today on the Big Take. If you can't beat them join them.
So when I arrived in South Africa's Greater Kruger Park, it's about five and a half million acres and I'm in the back of a jeep and we're kind of bouncing across the savannah looking for rhinos. And it's kind of this whole caravan of people that are all hunting for a rhino. And what's so crazy is you can't find any rhinos.
The people Jonathan is riding around with aren't poachers. They're park rangers who chase down the animals in hopes of saving their lives.
People would say, you know, ten years ago, this never would have happened. You could always find the rhino. Some people we have binoculars. Some people are expert trackers, so they're also looking for tracks. And we look and we look, and nobody can find a rhino. So I convinced the helicopter crew to let me go up with them because there was a helicopter here that was also going to
be part of the team. So we get in a helicopter and it's the pilot, myself and a veterinarian with a long gun, and from up in a helicopter, we still can't find it like we're literally like quirkscrewing around, going probably one hundred feet off the ground at most two hundred, like really zipping along the tree line the wh Sometimes we pause and you see zebras everywhere, you see giraffes, you see herds of elephants. Sometimes you see
lions these by these waterholes. But we can't find any rhinos. And it takes us about four or five loops around this big corner of Kruger National Park, and we're zipping this way and that way, and it's all spectacular, but the pilots are kind of muttering, where's the rhino? Where's the rhino? And finally they spot a mom rhino with a calf, and we hovered just above it, and they're looking through binoculars because they need to know do these
rhinos have horns? And they confirm that both rhinos have horns, and that means that they're gonna shoot.
Them, but not shoot them with bullets. Instead, the veterinarian loads up his rifle with a heavy duty tranquilizer. Two shots later and there are two drowsy rhinos. The jeeps that have been following along speed up to get close to the animals.
And the helicopter comes to a quick stop, and basically the veterinarian is running through this grass, and this grass is pretty high, it's like waist hie, and it's full of these weird, huge yellow spiders called golden orbs. The rhinos now been darted and it hasn't tipped over yet. We're about ten meters away from the rhino. It's quite slowed down, it's moving a little bit, but it's about
to topple over. And one of the first things they have to do is load the eyes with eye drops, because it turns out that if you sedate a rhino, it leaves its eyes open doesn't blink, and the first time they do these operations, the rhinos all went blind. So there's all sorts of very you know, timely and life saving or life threatening procedures going on between the
veterinarian team and the two rhinos. Then comes one of the probably the most kind of disheartening or kind of terrifying aspects of this is that a guy starts up. Sometimes he use a chainsaw, and so with these saws, they fire them up and they kind of brace themselves and they very slowly lean into the horn, and you can just see the horn being eaten away and it says chips this rhino horn flying around. It smells kind of weird. It kind of smell like almonds or nuts.
As this whole thing is going down, within thirty seconds, they've sawed off the horns and they take the horns and they immediately take a sharpie and they put like a code number on it, almost like a serial number. These are immediately passed to a man with a pistol and he's the security guard. And immediately these horns are highly sought after and dangerous to have. You know, if you have rhino horns on you, you're in South Africa
these days, you are ripe for an assault. So these horns are immediately going to kind of a security custodial person who's armed. They've got more guns in the car, they've got padlocks. So there's a whole security team here that within seconds takes possession of these horns. The actual sawt off horn gets a hole drilled in it and gets a microchip in it, and it gets a code. It's almost like a valuable diamond. Each individual horn haads
its own code, its own log. You know, it's almost like a medical file, all the paperwork on each remaining horn. That horn is then placed in special vaults. You can get rhino horn insurance if you have it at a vault at your house, which is not recommended at all. It's really dangerous the rhino horns your home because it might be robbed. So you have these special companies that
transport and store rhino horns for you. And we're seeing that the government has their stockpiles, the private individuals of their stockpiles, the conservation groups of their stockpiles. In South Africa, they don't destroy it. In some countries they would destroy, burn tusks and burn horn. For now they're being stockpiled, and it's extremely dangerous because there's often assaults on these warehouses.
Clearly, a lot of effort in care goes into removing the rhino's horn without harming the animal, and a rhino without a horn has no value to a poacher. This was the big breakthrough. Instead of chasing poachers, the rangers started chasing what the poachers are after the horns themselves. Getting to the horn before the poachers do is key because poachers who spot a horned rhino don't bother with the helicopters and tranquilizers and the eye.
Drops in the wild. When the poachers come, they kill the rhino by shooting bullets into his head and they chop off the horn. And that's that. What happens now is the environmentalist and the conservation groups are all They call it the horn trimming.
Remember that helicopter you heard just a bit ago. Bruce McDonald is one of its pilots, and Jonathan spoke to him during his field reporting.
It was almost inconceivable.
It is.
And the thing is that it's not a one solfa operation. You'll DeHorn an animal and eighteen months to two years down the line you could redo that animal because the hone does grow back, which becomes a cost thing as well. It gets expensive to do this. There's helicopters' aircraft, there's bits involved, there's security companies. It's in a fully fleeced operation which all costs money. So it's not a one solf it's not a silver bullet, but it certainly does help.
And if this is going to last time, well then we're gonna keep doing it.
And this worldwide illegal trade in rhino horns has just decimated rhino populations around the.
World because of the rhino trade is focused in Asia. What we've seen is full on extinction of certain species in Asia and now the attacks coming to South Africa. Tens of thousands of rhinos have been poached. You know, The Northern white rhino is down to two females, which obviously cannot breed. The Southern white rhino is down to
maybe fifteen thousand, we're talking from fifty sixty thousand. The populations are just plummeting, and every year we're seeing ten to fifteen, almost twenty percent of the rhinos we wiped out per year. The rhino population in Kruger Park is down by seventy eight percent over the last decade. So you had thousands and thousands. Now it could be as
little twenty two hundred rhinos still left. There's even talk that the poachers say, if we kill every last one, then the price of the horn will go through the roof, because then it's a commardi that's no longer around. So there's this battle to say these last few thousand rhinos. As we've heard, that battle is being waged in large part by park rangers, a job that used to mean a background in biology now requires a whole different skill set.
Jonathan also spoke with Tiri, Chuck and Yuka. He's a specialist training officer at the Southern African Wildlife College that's a training ground for new rangers.
These days, porches and are most sophisticated today have become more militarized. So with rangers, we've also adapted to militarize rangers to train them as military, but not as full military, but in a paramilitary fashion so that you can also what they can be able to combat the poachers and try to also decrease poaching will never be finished, but it can be decreased.
After the break. Who are the poachers willing to take these big risks? So we know that poachers are decimating rhino populations, but who are the poachers?
The poaching gangs are a real mixture of locals who are hired to do the dirty work. And these locals tend to be poor people who live along the western border of Kruger National Park. If you think of Kruger National Park, there's twenty six hundred rhinos left and there's two point six million pretty poor people along the border.
So you could say there's a thousand poor people for every rhino, and so the whole odds against the rhino surviving are really influenced by the basic economic realities of this. One rhino horn could give you as much money as you'd make in a lifetime. I calculated that, you know, a pound of rhino horn was basically three or four years wages. And what they do with the horn is they then pass it off because you don't just kill a horn and then find a buyer. This whole operation
begins with somebody who's a miss. This is somebody who's going to organize and set up the logistics of killing the rhino, and then that same person will be the one that will get smuggled out of the country and pass it to the next handler, whoill usually be in Southeast Asia. So the typical operation would cost six eight thousand dollars because they have to bribe somebody inside the park, because it's almost always from inside information that a rhinos poached.
It's not somebody wanders in the park looking for a rhino, especially today when there's so few rhinos left. So the poaching organizations need to find somebody inside the park where they can bribe.
There are penalties in South Africa for those convicted of poaching, but it's not too often that someone actually gets caught, and in a lot of cases, the rewards far outweigh the risks. There was a recent report that said so many insiders are working with the poaching gangs that the rhinos and the animals are being killed by guns that are stay inside the park. They found baboons playing with guns.
If on the elephants playing with the guns. There's all these guns stashed in the park and those guns are then used by the team that's been alerted, you know, come in Thursday, take out the rhino, and then the rhino horn is smuggled out, often by a park employee, goes to Cape Town and then probably goes to Mozambique and from Mozambique over to Southeast Asia. This is not like a fly by night operation. This is sophisticated gangs, the same kind of people that could move you know,
kilos of cocaine. And if the promise of money isn't enough to make a ranger turn a blind eye, the poachers sometimes resort to threats.
What we're finding is that dozens and dozens of rangers inside Krueger have been implicated in collaboration, and it's not always because they're just looking for the money. A lot of times they get death threats. So somebody might come to a park ranger and Krueger say I want you to look the other way on Thursday, or if not, it might kill your wife and your kids. Or they might say, we know there's rhino in section six on Thursday, don't go anywhere near Section six. Stay away from Section six.
We'll deal with the rhino. If not, we'll deal with you. So there's all sorts of heavy duty intimidation by which the public employees and the conservation folks inside Krueger get their arms twisted to work with the poaching gangs. I spent weeks traveling with rangers inside Kruger National Park in Greater Kruger Park, and the rangers are risking their life every day. The last year in Africa, one hundred rangers
were killed, most of them shot. Unfortunately, the reason they actually found out about this story is that one of the most beloved and honest rangers and all of Krueger was murdered in July of twenty twenty two. He wouldn't take bribes. So the poaching gangs threatened him. They warned him to the extent that he moved his family. He had to hide his children. And his name was Anton Mazimba, and he was a longtime ranger thirty years about to retire.
And he was at his house when a team of assassins came or pretended like their car broke down, and they asked him for water to fix their radiator, and when he came back, they shot him repeatedly. They shot his wife. His wife survived, but Anton Mazimba, and this is less than a year ago, was murdered because he wouldn't take bribes from the rhino poachers. And that sent a shockwave through all the rangers because you know, he
had met with Prince William recently in England. He's the star of a movie called Rhino Man that's coming out. This is about as close as you get to being like a celebrity ranger for somebody protecting rhinos. And so if they could take out Anton, it made the feeling that maybe they could take out anybody.
Here's helicopter pilot Jerry McDonald and in fact he's a twin brother of Bruce McDonald, the helicopter pilot we heard from earlier.
It affected everyone really badly and we didn't realize just how close we were to Anton. We're working with him daily, you know, we do a lot of work with him. And unfortunately, this is a new modus oper any that these syndicates are starting to use. They intimidate the field rinders, so when they go home, they're not safe. They actually
feel threatened. When they go home. You speak to any of the field randers, they don't feel comfortable when they don't leave because it's happened to one of the brothers and they feel it's can happen to them.
Park rangers are putting their lives on the line for these animals, and that requires a connection to the landscape and to the wildlife that few South Africans who live outside the park ever get to experience.
And you have these people going on these expensive safaris to see the Big five, which is you've got you've got the buffalo, you've got the rhino, you've got the elephant, you've got the leopard, you've got the lion. But two kilometers away, you know, a ten minute drive across the park borders, you've got tens of thousands of people living in houses that barely have water, that have a tin roof.
The unemployment is about forty percent, and a lot of these people have never seen any of the animal You don't have animals outside of Krueger very much. You see some monkeys and baboons, but to see the elephants, to see the giraffe, to see the herds of impala going around, you have to be in the parks. And there's this complete disconnect for most of the African folks who live near these parks, where they've never had an opportunity to
go in the park. And so we're just now seeing some really innovative programs by which the park wardens are taking their rangers into the community, they're going to the classrooms, they're bringing the kids into the parks, and we're starting to see thousands, if not tens of thousands of kids be introduced to the wildlife that's their own backyard. But
for many years, there's a complete disconnect. Now that people are trying to stitch the community into the understanding of what a healthy ecosystem looks like, there's all sorts of opportunities, but the question is is it too little, too late.
Jonathan spoke to another group of people who hope that it isn't too late, and they're also trying to protect their rhino in an unconventional way.
Because of the rhino poaching, Different rangers in different park wardens throughout Greater Krueger coming up with different strategies because it's just heartbreaking. These people will have ten rhinos on Friday and Monday, they only have seven lefts. So Craig Spencer, conservationists in South Africa, came up with a concept called the Black Mambas. And what he did was he trained local women to be trackers. He trained them to use firearms, he trained them to be in great shape so they
could patrol, He trained them to run security. And then what he did is he sent out these all women groups of all local women, and he put them on staff and he had them patrol the lines with no guns, just walkie talkies and all this knowledge of the local community.
And what Craig Spencer figured was that if we had local women both inside the fence patrolling and outside the fence where they live and they have a lot of contacts with the community, he could make a bridge to understanding the kind of damage that poaching does and the value that animals have. For example, right away, all these women are being paid as part of the conservation mission, and the Black Mambas have a program called the Bush Babies where they go into the local schools and they
teach kids about the importance of conservation. They take those children, they bring them into the park. They kind of use the children as ambassadors into the community for anti poaching messages and they hear a lot in return. They're in the schools, they talk to the teachers, they talk to
the local policemen. They're wandering around, so they're also an informal intelligence agency that's getting gossip and notes and hearing things about you know who all of a sudden built a new second story in their house.
Doctor Joseph Accory is a biodiversity and conservation specialist at the Southern African Wildlife College, and he sees the important role that local residents can play in conservation.
So what do we do in terms of safeguards. One of our first lines of defense is the communities around us. There are our eyes and ears, So community engagement is very important to know our situational awareness around our protected areas.
So they're both kind of this low level intelligence group, but they're also a patrol group and their community outreach and these are the kind of like very novel efforts that I thought kind of show both the desperation and the ingenuity of what's happening here. The organized crime is so greased and so well funded that it's created a counter effect where different rangers in different parts of Krueger
are coming up with local strategies. And the black Mombots are an example of one way in which poaching and that part of Kruger has gone way down.
When we come back, can anything more be done to save these wild rhinos? So, Jonathan, what is the long term answer here? This elaborate game of whackama between conservationists and poachers I suppose could go on forever, but it doesn't seem really like a solution.
Well, one of the things that kept on coming up over and over again while reporting this story in South Africa and especially inside Krueger was this idea that focusing on the number of rhino was kind of ridiculous. People mocked me many times when I would just like, how many rhino are left? How many years longer? What they said to me, is Jonathan, the important thing is the amount of habitat we have for rhino. The rhino itself
is actually pretty resilient, doesn't have any natural enemies. They breed fairly easily, but only if they have the habitat. So they said, you might want to consider measuring how many hundreds of thousands of acres of habitat are we saving every year. Because there was more of a sense of stitching together what's left of the South African ecosystems into corridors or habitat. So there was a lot of efforts by people to turn farmland into habitat, to turn
abandoned lands into habitat. The only way the rhino's going to survive is it has more habitat, habitat that's integrated. So I think that although few people think the rhino will be posted to extinction, it's kind of be a poached into a semi wild status where you know, if you individual rhino has a bodyguard, or if you have one hundred thousand acre section of Kruger Park and there's only eight rhinos left there, I mean, yes, there's rhino,
but the rhinos we know it. It's kind of the survival of a massacre that's gone on off and on for a couple hundred years. So it's really hard to understand what is going to be a viable population by which we can have wild rhino on Earth that have some sense of behaving like wild rhino and not just you know, the rhinos that are in zoos in Australia and the United States and Mexico.
Some advocates have said that legalizing the trade in rhino horns could be one answer, but Jonathan says it's complicated.
There's many different proposals to protect rhinos, and one of them is the idea that a legalized trade in rhino horn would create so much money that it would then pump into habitat protection, into rhino conservation, into overall biodiversity survival strategies. The theory there is that rhino are being poached to the edge of extinction. There's been a ban on rhino horn for decades and all we've seen is
the rhinol populations get crushed and crushed and crushed. Whatever we're doing now is clearly not working.
Jonathan Franklin, thanks so much for speaking.
With me today.
Thank you very much.
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