In November last year, the residents of a rural area in South Africa?s KwaZulu-Natal province witnessed a surprising sight. High above their heads, silhouetted against an azure sky, suspended upside down by its legs and dangling from ropes below a speeding helicopter, was a blindfolded rhinoceros.
On that particular day, this scene repeated itself a number of times, as a team of dedicated conservationists transported 19 rare black rhinos to an area where it?s hoped they?ll soon begin breeding.
?We took those rhinos from an area where they needed to be reduced, to keep that population breeding adequately. So we were taking them from an area of high density to a new area, to create a new population of black rhino,? said Dr. Jacques Flamand, an internationally respected wildlife veterinarian and the head of the World Wildlife Fund?s Black Rhino Range Expansion Project.
According to the WWF, there are only about 4,800 of the animals left in Africa, about 1,900 of them in South Africa. There are also a few black rhinos in zoos around the world.
The creatures remain critically endangered ? not the least because poachers are killing them and their bigger white rhino cousins for their horns. The South African government says criminals killed more than 1,000 rhinos in the country in the past five years ? and almost 450 in 2011 alone.
The poaching epidemic is driven by the scientifically disproven belief that ground rhino horn cures cancer. It fetches very high prices on the black market in Asia.
The WWF said black rhinos were relatively common across Africa until the 1960s. ?Wildlife used to be so plentiful that people thought animals like black rhino were a limitless resource,? said Flamand. ?So they shot so many. I remember in East Africa when I was a child people were shooting rhino just for sport. That was part of the (black rhino?s) decline.?
He continued, ?More importantly was a loss of habitat ? more and more people encroaching onto their land and pushing them out. They?re not very tolerant of disturbance.?
Flamand has worked as a veterinarian and government wildlife advisor across Africa, Asia and the Middle East. His project to increase black rhino numbers in South Africa began in 2003. He maintained there weren?t enough suitable areas in the country to hold the animals.
?This project was designed to try and address that by entering into partnerships with other landowners ? not necessarily landowners traditionally involved in conservation ? to find land that would be able to harbor black rhino,? he said.
To find the very big tracts of land that black rhino need in order to thrive, and especially in South Africa?s Zululand region, was always a challenge, Flamand told VOA.
?What we needed were areas that could harbor a population of at least 50 black rhino (each). And that, in Zululand for instance, translates to about 200 square kilometers ? and nobody had farms that size,? he said, explaining further, ?So through a lot of hard work we?ve succeeded in getting landowners to join their properties to create the very big areas that black rhino need.?
The landowners, helped by the WWF, took down the many fences on their properties that would have hindered rhino movements ? and therefore breeding. In so doing, the large areas needed by black rhino were formed.
?To date we?ve been successful in creating seven such areas and there are more in the pipeline. We?ve released seven new populations of black rhino in the hope that they?re going to breed successfully,? said Flamand.
The new populations of black rhino are made up of a total of 120 animals. Landowners participating in the project are implementing extremely tight security systems on their ranches to keep the rhinos safe from poachers.
Flamand agreed that the mere presence of rhino on land in South Africa ensured that the property could be targeted by criminals trying to get their hands on the animals? valuable horns. ?A lot of people don?t want rhino (on their land) because they?ve become a liability with the poaching, and that is a problem,? the wildlife veterinarian acknowledged.
He added that even in the absence of poaching, rhinos are a ?hard sell.? Flamand explained that there are ?very few? immediate benefits for landowners of having black rhino on their land, unless the owners are ?into tourism and can use black rhino as a marketing tool.? But some landowners aren?t in the tourism industry.
Nevertheless, he and the WWF have succeeded in persuading a number of South African ranchers of the conservation benefits of hosting populations of black rhinos.
