Champion racehorses find new purpose on bushveld patrols

When Anna Mussi arrived in the frontier town of Hoedspruit she had no plans to stay too long.

UK-born Mussi, who was recovering from a car crash that cost her job with a UK racehorse trainer, was on a gap year before heading off to study equine science at university.

Instead, she met the owner of a local horseback-safari operator who gave her a job. It was a world away from her previous life as a work rider who mucked out stables, exercised horses and took them to the races.

Those skills would come in handy again when, at the beginning of 2019, she joined Rhino Revolution, a group of conservationists and reserve owners who joined forces a decade ago to combat the growing poaching crisis in the area around SA’s premier wildlife town.

Among the group’s not-sosecret weapons are four racehorses, all previous champions on racetracks in Zimbabwe.

“We have four ex-racehorses, all winners,” said Mussi. “Winter’s Night won the Derby in Zimbabwe, which was quite a big deal.”

Once their racing days were over, the four horses – Winter’s Night, Beat Patrol One Last Trick and Splendid Pambur – came to SA with their trainer and soon found work doing mounted patrols in the Rietspruit Conservancy, a 5,000ha spread of private reserves close to the Kruger National Park.

What otherwise would have happened to them after their racing days is uncertain. In the UK there is a big retraining programme. In Zimbabwe such options are few and far between. If they were injured or unable to work, they would likely have been put down.

The horse patrols are carried out along with dog patrols to prevent incursions by poachers and to monitor fences.

“We can also keep an eye on the rhino much easier on horseback because the horses are much quieter,” said Mussi.

“We can get much closer to the animals and monitor their behaviour and condition more easily than if we were on foot or in a vehicle.”

One of the benefits of using thoroughbred horses in the bush is their natural alertness.

“They pick up on anything strange like an object or a funny sound, or if they smell or hear an animal in the bush, they can pick it up before we do.”

The trainers still had their work cut out for them as the horses slowly got used to the sights and smells of the bush and had their first encounters with predators such as lions and wild dogs.

Predators usually keep their distance, said Mussi. If the horses are trained to not act like prey, the predators will move off first.

One of the patrols recently encountered a large pack of wild dogs.

“They were about 50m away,” said Mussi. “We just stood still and watched them for about 20 minutes. They were quite curious – they got up and came closer but in the end they all just ran off.”

While the horses have helped find plenty of poachers’ snares, their very presence is a deterrent in itself.

“People see these armed guards riding the fence line on horses and they have no idea what their capabilities are. They are easily visible, their tracks are everywhere on the fence line.”

That more game reserves do not use horses is mostly due to the high cost of running a mounted patrol operation.

But although vehicles may be cheaper to keep, they are noisy and struggle in terrain that horses find easy.

The hard work was clearly paying off. In 2019, a male rhino joined the crash of rhino called the Lucky Five – the five rhinos who were orphaned by poachers and rehabilitated in the conservancy’s endangered species orphanage before being released into the wild.

“We rode out on a monitoring patrol to see if the male was still with them and we found all six of them still together,” said Mussi. “To see these orphans that were completely traumatised and to be able to engage with them on horseback in their natural habitat – that was for me the ultimate reward.”

It’s now been 10 years since Mussi left home. “Riding horses in the bush … everything that you experience here on a daily basis, I don’t think anybody could miss the UK.”