Renee Hartslief’s Private Game Park, is focused on education. Visitors are able to come very close to the rhinos. They can get a lesson in how smaller-scale owners are combatting the poachers by injecting rhino horns with a red dye that will make humans sick. “The poison that’s in the horn is not suitable for human consumption,” Renee Hartslief, owner of Private Game Park said. “We don’t know if that means they will die, certainly we hope they won’t, but it does mean they will get very sick.” Injecting these valuable horns, as the team did two years ago, is controversial. It can be dangerous for the animal. The procedure hasn’t been widely adopted. Without millions of dollars to spend, Renee and her team are always open to new ideas. “I don’t think you can ever have too much security, but by the same token you can’t only have security. You have to try different methods, because the way we’re going right now, nothing is working,” Hartlief said. “You see that with the numbers just escalating. So for myself, I have tried everything – I tried de-horning the rhinos, and then the poachers started going after the base of the horn.” Tourism has generated some revenue for the increasing costs of protection efforts. Visiting to see one of the ‘Big 5′ has become a favorite pastime, so South Africans are desperate to stop the killings. But 2014 has been another record year with 1,116 rhinos have been poached to date. It has happened despite a massive public awareness campaign and a significant militarization on the ground. Unfortunately, that hasn’t worked either. This has left even well-resourced parks looking for alternatives-like canine patrols. The dog is able to pick up a poacher’s scent with his nose far faster than a human can see a poacher with his eyes.” This canine unit training center was opened earlier this year, as the first of its kind. It’s run by a private defense contractor that hopes to roll out teams across the continent. “This is not conventional warfare. We have to accept that this is a proper insurgency, it’s guerilla warfare,” Ivor Ichikowitz, CEO Paramount Group said. “It’s an issue of theft of Africa’s resources, and we have to use the right tools to fight that. We’re finding that dogs are some of the best tools in fighting this war.” Anyways Munarwo is the sole security guard on Hartslief’s land. He has seen suspicious helicopters overhead. The criminal syndicates have abundant resources. Munarwo said he hasn’t seen a poacher. Munarwo described the large fence that acts as a barrier between poachers and rhinos. He said the fence is a good deterrent, there has been some incidents where the fence has been vandalized. “Six months ago, I was patrolling here and I saw the whole fence was cut. Somebody had cut the fence and come in. So I went to look, but everything was fine. They hadn’t done anything,” Munarwo said. With government parks and wealthier private owners struggling to protect the rhinos, the smaller ones are even more vulnerable.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Dec 2014 11:40:40 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015