As a result, Hendricks says roughly 80 to 90 percent of poachers in Kruger Park are from Mozambique, one of the poorest countries in the world. Until recently, the penalty for poaching in Mozambique was a small fine that rarely got paid. First, it’s huge - more than 19,000 square kilometers, about the size of the country of Wales, and difficult to manage.Īn even bigger problem though is the long porous border Kruger shares with neighboring Mozambique. HENDRICKS: Our translocation program is aimed at translocating rhinos from hotspots - poaching hotspots - to areas of high levels of security.īASCOMB: Kruger Park is a poaching hotspot for several reasons. (Photo: Sokwanele-Zimbabwe Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) In order to do so, they cut into her skull and then left her to bleed to death. Poachers tranquilized a pregnant black rhino and removed her horn. Howard Hendricks, from the South African National Parks conservation services explains. Now the park is trying to sell off some of its rhinos to places like Black Rhino Game Reserve in the hope that they might find safer sanctuary. But they are losing them at an unsustainable rate - between one and two a day are killed by poachers. Roughly 530 kilometers east of Pilanesberg, Kruger is home to more than 8000 rhinos, the single largest population in the world. It’s a dangerous place for rhinos and the people protecting them but it’s still far safer than the country’s largest park, Kruger National Park. It’s almost like an unprotected war zone.īASCOMB: Black Rhino Game Reserve lost three rhinos to poaching this year, all of them within 100 meters of the road. JOUBERT: These guys, when they come on they’ve got snipers and they’ve got AK47s and they have weapons that can’t match what the anti-poaching guys have. They always try to find the highest place in the reserve and then they’ll change their sort of patrol tracks because they don’t want any kind of routine because then it can be learned.īASCOMB: The anti-poaching units are similar to military personnel and the job is just as dangerous. JOUBERT: Right on that hill about half a kilometer in front of us on the right, that’s usually where they are stationed. Michael Joubert, Co-owner of the reserve, bumps along in the back of a safari truck and points across a wide expanse of knee-high dried grass towards the anti-poaching unit charged with protecting the conservation land’s rhinos. (Photo: Dion Hinchcliffe Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)īASCOMB: A red dirt path cuts through the savannah of the Black Rhino Game Reserve in South Africa’s Pilanesberg National Park. There are only 25,000 rhinos left in the world, most of which live in South Africa.
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