Rhino in Crisis: A Blueprint for Survival
Unfortunately our rhinos are still our biggest worry, so I have to bore you with more information and more stories about it. I know it won’t make any difference to the fact, that rhinos one day, as so many other wildlife, might be extinct. We humans are just too bad of an influence to nature. However I still find it’s important at least for some of us to understand.
In addition to our terrible drought and killing heat, we had a very tough time over Christmas and New Years Eve. Just before New Years Eve one of our rhino cows, the last one with a horn (we had already dehorned all the others), was killed, poached of course and her horn axed off again. The reason why we hadn’t dehorned her was that we wanted to wait as she had such a small calf. How sad is this story. However, her calf was clever and got away. Unfortunately it was so clever, that it didn’t want to be seen at all any more, definitely not by humans that wanted to dart her. It took us 5 days to find the little bugger and we couldn’t believe it was still alive. An amazing team of a vet and her husband who is a game warden on one of the neighbouring farms, one of our landowners with his whole family and his staff and our research team GVI didn’t give up trying to find the baby. Philip tried to help with the horse the first day, but then we had clients and he couldn’t carry on. The day the clients left he immediately jumped on his horse Sam to spend 8 hours helping to find and dart the baby rhino. And this time they succeeded. What a strong little bugger, who managed to survive that long without it’s mother. She is now in a rhino orphanage doing well.