Man’s best friend becomes ally to at-risk rhinos
Kruger National Park’s K9 unit dogs are playing a large role in the fight against poachers
HIS GROWLS echoed loudly across the vast plain as he bit into a padded arm guard worn by a field ranger.
This dog’s main aim is to track and catch poachers.
“He’s a jack of all trades,” said his handler and K9 manager for the Kruger National Park (KNP), Johan de Beer.
As part of a media trip with South African National Parks, journalists visited the K9 management facility in the KNP yesterday to learn about the type of dogs used as part of the park’s anti-poaching campaign.
De Beer’s dog Delta is one of 52 that make up the park’s K9 unit, which is focused on stopping poachers.
“Dogs have been involved in about 85 percent of our successes with catching poachers,” said De Beer.
“There are one to two dogs in each section and our dogs can follow tracks from about 22km up to 28km.”
The park uses all dog breeds, but mainly Belgian malinois, bloodhounds and bloodhound crosses.
“Belgian malinois do well in the heat and they don’t get the diseases of German Shepherds. We use them when picking up a warm scent which is up to three hours old (following an incursion) and for bite work.
“The bloodhounds are used to pick up a cold scent which is from three hours old and up,” De Beer explained, adding that they used all types of breeds at the gates to the park.
De Beer also described how the K9 training centre worked.
“We get dogs which are trained here, and from here they get deployed to the sections. They come back every three months for retraining, maintenance training and certification, so every six months we will certify and evaluate all our dogs to make sure they are certified to work.”
De Beer is responsible for all the logistics for the dogs, including food and their overall wellness.
It costs around R17 000 month to sustain one dog.
Bloodhounds will work with anyone if they have to
“That means food, maintenance, training, transport and vet costs.”
He said honorary rangers and sponsors helped with the funding.
De Beer added that they were careful when matching a handler to a dog.
“Each dog has one handler; the Belgian malinois are very handler-finicky dogs and they don’t like to work with multiple handlers. The bloodhounds will work with anyone if they have to; each dog has only one handler,” said De Beer.
We were given a demonstration of tracking and bite work. We watched as the park’s star dog, Killer, tracked several veld.
During the bite-work simulation, De Beer called to a field ranger who was pretending to hide as a poacher would, in the bushes.
“Come out of the bushes,” called De Beer, but the ranger remained hidden.
In a matter of seconds, De Beer released Delta, shouting the words “soek hom” (find him).
The ranger had no choice but to emerge from the bushes as Delta found him and gripped his arm guard.
Following the demonstration, the field ranger, who asked to remain anonymous, said getting attacked by one of the dogs was “always nerve-racking”.
“It gets your adrenalin flowing and you have to make sure you don’t get hurt,” he said, his hand holding his chest as he breathed hard.
“It can be very scary,” he added with a nervous smile.
JOHN Hume owns more rhinos than anyone else in the world. All told there are 1 405 rhinos living on his closely guarded wildlife ranch near Klerksdorp, about 200km south-west of Joburg.
To put that figure into perspective, Hume personally owns more rhinos than the whole of Kenya.
Collectively, with 330 other private South African rhino owners, Hume and his colleagues own more than 30 per- cent of all the rhinos in this country – more than the total combined population of rhinos throughout Africa (excluding South Africa).
The former holiday resorts developer retired 24 years ago to set up a new game ranch close to the Kruger National Park and began to build up what would become the world’s largest privately owned rhino herd.
In 2008, worried about the rapidly increasing rhino poaching rate, he shifted more than 200 rhinos from his old Mauricedale Farm in Mpumalanga to a more secure property in North West.
“Mauricedale was a beautiful piece of Africa, but there were so much tree canopy cover and other hiding places that poachers could have hidden there for a week and you would never see them.”
So he moved his operation to a new “flat, ugly and very dry” property in North West, which now has more than 1 400 rhinos – 953 of which were born and bred on Hume’s properties.
When The Star visited the property last week, close to 100 rhinos could be seen munching from feeding troughs in an area the size of a soccer pitch.
Hume insists that this is abnormal. Normally, the rhinos mostly graze naturally in 14 large “camps” spread out over the 8 000 hectare property.
However, because of the drought and shortage of natural grazing and browse, Hume has been compelled to provide supplementary feeding spots to ensure his animals don’t starve.
There is also a special nursery facility where rhino calves are hand-reared if their mothers die or run out of milk.
One of his managers, who guided a party of journalists around the farm, estimated that Hume was currently providing 16 tons a day of supplementary feed (lucerne, teff, barley and other food) to the herds.
He also showed us a large temperature-controlled “hothouse” where seedlings are grown under artificial light to rapidly produce fresh green shoots that are mixed up with other feed and then carted off to the rhino camps by tractor.
We also visited his security command post, “Afghanistan”, which houses the anti-poaching reaction staff, a patrol helicopter, aerial surveillance drones and tracker dogs.
The helicopter hangar is right next to the security manager’s compound, so that reaction units can get airborne night and day if horn poachers decide to strike.
Hume estimates that he spends well over R2 million a month on security costs alone, excluding the cost of veterinary expenses, vehicles, food mixes and salaries.
We also saw two white rhinos being de-horned swiftly by a veterinarian and capture team. Each horn is weighed carefully after removal, and stored away along with tiny pieces of remnant horn shavings.
The animals are de-horned on a regular basis, said Hume, partly for security reasons and also to add to the rapidly expanding stockpile of horns that he has not been allowed to sell since early 2009, when the government declared a moratorium on the domestic sale of rhino horns.
Though the sale of rhino horns across international borders was banned 39 years under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), local rhino owners were allowed to sell horns on the domestic market until the moratorium was declared seven years ago.
While Hume describes himself as a man who breeds and protects rhinos, he also stands to make vast sums of money if he can convince the government to lift the domestic moratorium on horn sales, and also persuade CITES to lift the international ban on horn sales.
Hume personally owns a stockpile of over 5 tons of rhino horns and reckons he can produce another ton of horns every year from “harvesting” horns from his personal herd.
Last year, he won a court case against the Minister of Environmental Affairs, Edna Molewa, with the high court ordering that the moratorium was illegal because Hume and other rhino owners were not consulted properly.
He also won the case when it went on appeal, but the moratorium remains in place pending a further appeal by the minister in the Constitutional Court.
Hume says he is optimistic that the Concourt will rule in his favour within the next few weeks. “I breed and protect rhinos, and this project could be copied by almost anyone. This is the way to save them from extinction. I trim their horns so they can grow again.”