Rhino’s saviour brought their plight to the world’s attention
Conservationist founded Kenya’s Lewa Wildlife Conservancy
Anna Merz, who has died aged 81, founded the Ngare Sergoi Rhino Sanctuary in central Kenya (now the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy) and dedicated her life to the preservation of endangered rhinoceros species.
Desmond Morris observed that she was to rhinos what Joy Adamson was to lions, Dian Fossey to gorillas and Jane Goodall to chimpanzees.
Anna Merz was not trained to be a conservationist. Having started as a lawyer, in the 1970s she was working in Ghana when she became concerned about mercenaries with AK-47s who shot rhinos and hacked off their horns to supply demand from herbalists in China and Southeast Asia.
The decline in the rhino population was precipitous. In Kenya alone, the number of black rhinos dropped from an estimated 20,000 to fewer than 300 in a single decade. “When we went to Kenya in ’68, we saw rhinos everywhere,” Merz recalled. “When we went in ’76, we saw corpses everywhere. The massacre was unbelievable.”
The only way to prevent their complete extinction was to create high-security sanctuaries, and in the early 1980s she approached David Craig, the owner of a 62,000-acre ranch on the Lewa Downs in northern Kenya, to ask whether he would allow her to build a sanctuary to protect the endangered rhinos.
In 1983, Craig and his wife Delia set aside 5,000 acres where, using a family inheritance of more than $750,000, Merz established the Ngare Sergoi Rhino Sanctuary.
With the Craigs, she recruited game-trackers, bush pilots, veterinarians and others to round up animals; and for the next few years they tracked, captured and relocated to the refuge every remaining wild rhino in northern Kenya for breeding and safekeeping.
While the animals got used to their new environment in holding pens, Merz spent hours each day reading to them from Shakespeare which, she claimed, tamed them. The program was so successful that eventually the Craigs decided to dedicate their entire ranch to conservation. By 1994 the whole of Lewa Downs as well as the government-owned Ngare Ndare Forest Reserve had been enclosed within a 2.5-metre-high electric fence, creating a 61,000-acre rhino sanctuary. Merz was indefatigable in her efforts to bring the plight of the rhino to international attention, touring the world to give lectures and raise money to help meet annual running costs of $500,000. But she was always happier among her rhinos which, she insisted, were at least as intelligent as chimpanzees and were notably even-tempered and gentle animals.
The daughter of a lawyer who would become a High Court judge, she was born Florence Ann Hepburn Fawell near London on Nove. 17 1931. She studied politics and economics at Nottingham University, then read for the bar at Lincoln’s Inn.
But she was always more interested in travel and adventure, and in 1958 she went to Ghana, where she met her first husband, Ernest Kuhn, the Swiss owner of a light industrial workshop.
After her divorce from Kuhn, she married her second husband, Karl Merz, and together they explored much of Uganda and Kenya, eventually moving to Kenya in 1976.
For her work with rhinos, Merz was awarded the Global 500 Award from the UN Environment Program.
Her husband predeceased her in 1988.