The price of protecting RHINOS

Conservation has become a war, and park rangers and poachers are the soldiers.

BY CATHLEEN O’GRADY

“Hsst!” hisses Charles Myeni. “Leave space!” Silently, the men in his anti-poaching unit spread out as they move through the bush in single file, leaving a few feet between them.

Myeni explains his command to me: If a rhinoceros poacher attacks us and we're all neatly squished together in a line, he whispers, they “can take us all out, one-one-one-one. We're all gonna die.”

Is he serious? His sardonic half smile is difficult to read. He may just be trying to scare me, the city-dwelling white girl tagging along on his morning patrol through South Africa’s Somkhanda Game Reserve. But I still stick as closely as I can to him and his automatic rifle.

The three guns between the six men on patrol should be enough to overpower any poachers, Myeni tells me, since a poaching team usually carries just one rifle. The last would-be rhino poachers apprehended on the reserve, in March of last year, were traveling in a pair: One carried a gun, and one carried an ax to hack off the rhino's horn.

Myeni’s patrol moves swiftly, scouring the ground for tracks. The terrain is treacherous: The tawny, knee-high grass disguises ditches, rocks, and tree roots, while vicious thorn trees throw out branches at face height. The dry air on this bright winter morning is hot in the sun and freezing in the shade. Myeni spots rhino tracks and follows them for a while to check that they are not joined by human footprints, which would be a sign that someone had followed the rhino. But the tracks are old, and no rhino—or human—materializes.

Martin Saavedra

South Africa’s most recent rhino-poaching crisis came out of the blue. In 2007, the country lost just 13 rhinos to poaching; the next year, that number jumped to 83, kicking off a nightmarish escalation. Losses peaked at 1,215 in 2014, and deaths are still high: 2018, with 769 rhinos killed, was the first year that losses had dipped under 1,000 since 2013. South Africa is home to 93 percent of Africa’s estimated 20,000 white rhinos and 39 percent of the remaining 5,000 critically endangered black rhinos, making South Africa’s rhino crisis a global rhino crisis.

Demand for rhino horn has skyrocketed in Vietnam, where powdered horn is touted as both a hangover cure and a cancer treatment. Though it has no proven medicinal benefits—of no more value than human fingernails and hair, or horse hooves, which are made from the same material—it is associated with social status. As regional economies have boomed, its use has increased along with ordinary people’s purchasing power.

As the crisis continues, the job of protecting rhinos has changed dramatically. The South African military has stationed soldiers in the Kruger National Park. Surveillance technology like drones and light aircraft are used to spot signs of trouble. Rangers are trained by ex-military specialists. In 2012, the government body that oversees South Africa’s national parks appointed Johan Jooste, a retired army general, to oversee anti-poaching efforts.

As threats to species and natural resources escalate worldwide, conservation is looking more and more like war. National militaries play a role in conservation in the Congo, Cameroon, Guatemala, Nepal, and Indonesia. British troops have been sent to Malawi to provide ranger training. The U.S.-based nonprofit Veterans Empowered to Protect African Wildlife (VETPAW) sends veterans to “lead the war” against wildlife crime in Africa.

The conservation war is a human war—with human casualties. Myeni’s wife and children live with the knowledge that he is in constant danger, he says. Respect Mathebula, the first ranger in Kruger National Park to be killed by poachers in more than 50 years, was shot in July 2018. The International Ranger Federation reports that 269 rangers were killed across Africa between 2012 and 2018, the majority of them by poachers.

Meanwhile, Joaquim Chissano, the former president of Mozambique, alleges that 476 Mozambican poachers were killed by South African rangers between 2010 and 2015. South African authorities are cagey about releasing official figures, but research on organized crime estimates that between 150 and 200 poachers were killed in the Kruger National Park alone during the same period. In neighboring Botswana, anti-poaching action has reportedly resulted in dozens of deaths, and the country’s controversial “shoot to kill” policy—which gives rangers powers to shoot poachers dead on sight—has drawn allegations of abuse.

Species are swiftly being wiped out by the illegal wildlife trade, and the urgency of the situation provokes a panicked, violent response among those fighting to keep these species alive. But many conservationists are concerned about what the militarization of conservation means—for people, and for the success of conservation itself.

Martin Saavedra

In hluhluwe-imfolozi, the ever-present tension is mostly hidden from visitors. There are hints of the ongoing crisis—a quick search of the car upon entry; a sign forbidding the use of drones; a poster asking for donations to save the rhinos—but even here, rhino poaching mostly feels like something that is happening elsewhere.

The rhinos themselves are elusive. After seven days, I’ve seen countless elephants, zebras, baboons, and giraffes, and gawped at a cluster of orphaned rhinos kept in pens, but I’ve spotted not a single wild rhino. One afternoon, a series of booming, meaty grunts comes drifting into my room at the very edge of Hilltop Camp, along with a strong smell of cow dung. There’s clearly a gigantic herbivore a few feet away, but it is completely concealed by a dense screen of bushes and trees. Elephant? Or rhino? I spend ages peering into the bush, but I can’t see so much as a monkey.

The camp is surrounded by electric fences, making it safe for tourists to leave their cars and enjoy the picnic areas, swimming pool, and spectacular view from the restaurant terrace. At night, the Milky Way stretches across the sky; a small cluster of lights twinkles in the distance, a reminder that the towns dotting the borders of the park are not that far away.

Ordinary people have been kept out of iMfolozi, the southern section of the park, for roughly 200 years. The legendary Zulu king Shaka, who rose to power in 1819, drove out the inhabitants who lived between the two iMfolozi rivers and restricted hunting. In 1824, British settlers initiated ivory trade in the area, and their game hunting drove such a decline in the white-rhino population that five new reserves—including Hluhluwe and iMfolozi—were designated in 1895 by colonial authorities.

These days, the park is open only to the select few who find employment as conservation or tourism staff, and to the tourists who can afford to pay for the experience. My modest room at Hilltop Camp costs $595 for six nights, more than the monthly take-home pay of 93 percent of South Africans.

Conservation has a long history of removing people from their land in the interest of preserving wildlife. It’s a model that sees human occupation as incompatible with conservation, despite evidence that indigenous people can play a crucial role in protecting biodiversity. For many conservationists, tourism in otherwise human-free preserves is both a useful way to fund conservation and an industry to be protected in its own right. “Africa holds the last caches of this wildlife,” says Jooste, the retired general who oversees anti-poaching for South Africa’s national parks. Tourism helps protect wildlife for its own sake, he adds, and “it’s one of the economic engines of our country.”

In South Africa, the conflicts surrounding conservation divide along racial lines. Poachers are often assumed to be black, though this assumption is not always accurate, and news of their violent end is often celebrated by white South Africans. save a rhino, kill a poacher, reads a bumper sticker I used to see growing up in Johannesburg. the testicles of a rhino poacher can cure aids, says another, mocking both traditional medicine and South Africa’s HIV crisis while delivering its implicit threat.

There’s a widespread assumption among both black and white South Africans that conservation is a concern of white people. Meanwhile, black people witness a lucrative tourism industry operating on their ancestral lands, and the majority cannot afford to access it. Hostility and poverty combine to create the perfect storm for poacher recruitment. “[Poachers] know what the risk is, and they’re still willing to take it,” Massé says. “There’s a social and economic context that motivates them to do that.”

The poaching crisis is “an urgent situation,” he says, “but the militarization of conservation is having a lot of concerning impacts, both socially and ecologically.” Those impacts are both chronic and acute: In Eswatini, rangers allegedly killed suspected subsistence poachers hunting for meat. Anti-poaching forces in Tanzania have allegedly raped and tortured local villagers and suspected poachers. Anti-poaching units in Africa and Asia supported by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) have allegedly committed abuses ranging from assault to murder.

Not only are these incidents unconscionable in their own right, but they also intensify local opposition to conservation. Treating local people as enemies poses a risk to the sustainability of conservation, Massé says: “It creates tensions and hostilities, and alienates them.”

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SOURCE: The Atlantic
Article — https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2020/01/war-rhino-poaching/604801/