South African woman fights to save rhinos
KLERKSDORP, South Africa — Lynne MacTavish lives in a small wooden house on her South African game reserve with a fierce pet emu, a juvenile ostrich, a flock of geese, two Jack Russell terriers and her grandma’s double-barreled shotgun to protect her rhinos.
Shekeepsanugly statue at her gate: a tokoloshe, or evil spirit in the local traditional belief, installed by a witch doctor to ward off superstitious rhino poachers.
Every night MacTavish gets up after midnight, grabs her shotgun, clambers into her SUV and patrols for poachers.
She still gets flashbacks of the scene she found one windy October morning in 2014 and still cries telling the story. Poachers had killed two rhinos, including a pregnant cow she had known since the day it was born. Twomore died as an indirect result of the attack, and a calf, days from being born, was lost.
MacTavish, as tough as the spiky bush on her animal reserve in South Africa’s northwest, struggles to cover the cost of security guards. One local poacher has threatened to kill her.
SouthAfrica ishometo80 percent of theworld’s25,000 rhinos. Hamstrung by corruption and security lapses, it loses three rhinos a day to poaching, 85percent ofthem in state reserves. Private owners such as MacTavish have become important to the species’ survival, nurturing more than 6,500 rhinos on an estimated 330 private game reserves, spanning 5 million acres, that provide a relative degree of safety.
But security is costly — so much so that many reserves are closing their doors. To help generate revenue, private reserve operators have successfully sued to resume South Africa’s limited trade in rhino horns, which had beenbannedsince2009. The government is finalizing new regulations that will allow foreigners to export up to two horns apiece for personal use.
The measure has rocked the wildlife preservation world. Most wildlife advocates say opening the door even to “farmed” rhino horn sales could threaten aninternational effort to wipe out the trade across the globe. About 2,200 horns a year flow into the illegal trade, mostly poached, and opponents of the new trade rules argue that criminals will find ways to funnel poached horns into the new legal market.
“Reopening a domestic trade in rhino horn in South Africa would make it even harder for already overstretched law enforcement agents to tackle rhino crimes,” World Wildlife Fund policy manager Colman O’Criodain said in a statement.
“There is no domestic demand for rhino horn in South Africa, so it is inconceivable that anyone would buy it, unless they intend to sell it abroad illegally, or they are speculating that international trade will be legalized.”
South Africa’s Private Rhino Owners Association argues that a limited legal trade— using trimmed horn, without killing the animals — is the only safe way to meet demand in China and elsewhere in Asia. Selling horn, which regrows like fingernails, can help cover the huge cost of security and avert extinction, the owners contend.
Thepopulation is so finely balanced that if either side happens to be wrong, rhinos could die out within a decade.
In the attack on MacTavish’s reserve in 2014, poachers crept in at night and shot a female rhino she had named Cheeky Cow. The animal ran for several miles, leading the poachers away from her calf, but the killers backed her and three other females up against a fence line andshot her again, also hitting another young pregnant female, Winnie.
They slashed Cheeky Cow’s spinal cord with amachete so she couldn’t move and while shewas alive they smashed into her face with an ax to get her horns. Winniewas also alive when they hacked off her horns.
Whenshe foundWinnie’s body, MacTavish sat in the dirt and wept for half an hour.
“When you are looking at an animal you’ve known its whole life and you see what they’ve done to it, it’s cruelty beyond words,” MacTavish said. She knew then she had to dehorn her other rhinos “because you cannot bear the thought of any other rhino going through that horrific cruelty.”
She called the police to the scene, but they didn’t investigate the rhino carcasses, footprints or crime scene. Theyweredrinkingbeer, she said, and the police captain asked her to light a barbecue fire so as not to waste “good meat.”
MacTavish eventually called in vets to de-horn all of her rhinos; her 32-year-old bull, Patrol, died during the procedure.
She strongly supports the decision to lift the eight-year ban on legal rhino horn trading in South Africa. “Theban has been disastrous,” she said, because “it meant the only way to get horn was to poach it. The price skyrocketed.” It created a huge temptation for employees of farms like hers to work with poachers, she added.
“By just giving information to a syndicate, they can earn more money than they would in a year. The money is so high and the risk is so low because of our courts and policing. It just spells extinction.”