Shooting of pregnant rhino ‘a heavy loss’

The white rhino shot dead by poachers on the Lombardini Game Farm near Jeffreys Bay at the weekend was a pregnant female.

“She died with her calf so it’s a heavy loss,” property owner Johan Lottering said on Monday.

Lottering said the white rhino male that was wounded looked in reasonable shape.

“A vet has assessed him and it looks like he will survive.”

He said the poachers had not managed to remove the horns from the rhino.

“Our Bushman trackers heard four shots being fired between 1am and 2am on Saturday, and they called the police and the rest of our security team, who responded swiftly,” Lottering said.

“It seems all the commotion helped scare the poachers off before they could take the horns.”

The female rhino only died between 10am and 11am on Saturday, meaning that she had clung to life for several hours after being shot and this had also clearly caused a problem for the poachers, Lottering said.

“Rhino poachers usually strike on full moon nights, but Saturday was a new moon and visibility was not good.

“We don’t know if they had night-vision equipment but it was an unusual time for them to strike.”

Lombardini, a 1,200ha game farm between Jeffreys Bay, Humansdorp and St Francis, is named after the Italy-based diesel engine manufacturing company which previously owned the property.

Lottering said the poachers had crossed a neighbouring farm to get to a little-used section of Lombardini before cutting through the electrified perimeter fence.

They had used a heavy calibre .375 rifle to shoot the rhinos, he said.

“We have been doing what we can to prevent poaching and the police were super-efficient in their response on Saturday.

“But we need to put more deterrents in place and we’ll be looking into the possibilities.”

The latest incident marks the fourth time rhino poachers have struck at Lombardini, with six of the animals killed there in total.

According to not-for-profit company Stop Rhino Poaching, 508 rhinos had been slaughtered in 2018 by poachers in SA up to September 21.

The carnage started in 2008, when 83 were killed.

In 2014, 1, 215 were killed and, in 2017, the toll was 1 028.

“More than 7,100 rhinos have been killed by poachers in South Africa in the past decade,” the organisation said.

In the Eastern Cape, the latest rhino poaching deaths at Lombardini bring the death toll to 17 so far in 2018.

Twelve rhinos were killed in the province in 2017.

While northern white rhinos are extinct in the wild, southern white rhinos are classified as near-threatened and about 20,000 survive in their main range in SA, Zimbabwe and Namibia.

SA’s other rhino species, the black rhino, is classified as critically endangered, with only about 5,300 left.