Saving the Rhino Through Sacrifice
In Africa, hunters are paying $150,000 to kill an endangered black rhino. And that may save the species
At the Mauricedale ranch in South Africa, an endangered black rhino charges James Oatway
In June 1996 a game rancher named John Hume paid about $200,000 for three pairs of endangered black rhinos from the wildlife department of the South African province of KwaZulu-Natal. Among them was a male who would come to be called "Number 65," and whose death would play a central role in the debate about conservation.
South Africa did not start the auctions because it had a surplus of the animals. Quite the opposite. Although the black rhinos had been reproducing, they were still critically endangered. Only about 1,200 remained within the country's borders. But black rhinos are massive animals, and with just under 7 percent of the country set aside in protected areas, conservationists and wildlife departments had run out of room to accommodate them.
Hume's 6,500-hectare ranch, Mauricedale, lies in the hot, scrubby veldt in northeastern South Africa. Hume, 68, made his fortune in taxis, hotels, and time-shares, and Mauricedale was his Xanadu, a retirement project of immense proportions. In the late 1990s he began buying up many of the neighboring farms and ranches, and his triangular estate would soon be boxed in on all sides by roads and sugar cane plantations. Hume also was rapidly becoming the largest private owner of white rhinos; there are currently 250 split between Mauricedale and another similar property. He also raises cape buffalo, roan and sable antelopes, hippos, giraffes, zebras, and ostriches.
When the black rhino bull arrived, Hume's farm manager—a burly Zimbabwean named Geoff York whose typical mode of dress is army boots and a pair of purple shorts—tranquilized him, clipped two notches in his left ear and two in the right, and gave him a number: 65.
With a horn worn down to 20 inches from rubbing it against rocks, Number 65 was not a beautiful bull. It wouldn't take long for him to cause trouble at Mauricedale. Very soon, Number 65 started fights with a young male, who died in November 2000 following a particularly nasty run-in. He chased the other bulls off to an area of the farm called Thanda Nani so he could have the females all to himself. For two years he mingled exclusively with Hume's cows, yet they never bore him a calf. He was no longer able to breed. "He dominated the farm," says York. "We knew he was a problem."
Hume was not the only one struggling with his black rhino bulls. As far back as 1992, the African Rhino Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) had discussed the "surplus male problem," says the group's longtime scientific officer, Richard Emslie. Females can raise only a single offspring every two to three years, but males can sire many. As in cattle ranching, population growth rates are highest when the number of bulls in a herd is limited. It was beginning to look as if, for the first time since they were added to Appendix I—the highest level of protection under the 1977 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES)—a black rhino should be legally hunted and killed.
More conservationists, such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), are embracing the notion that legalized hunting—and the creation of a market for the right to shoot and harvest an animal—may help endangered species. The black rhino is a trophy for many hunters, who are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot them. Such men travel to Africa from Russia, Japan, Spain, and Eastern Europe, but Americans dominate the market. Fred Leonard, who once had a Michigan business designing plastic parts for the auto industry, is a typical client. Despite two open-heart surgeries, Leonard has made 13 trips to the continent to bag leopard, lion, elephant, buffalo, and various antelope. He's got more than 75 dead animals—all of them legal—displayed in a special room in his house outside of Grand Rapids, Mich. Leonard bemoans the common confusion of hunters with poachers. The difference, he says, is that hunters care about the environment—and the law. "Most hunters are decent people," he says.
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