The Travelling Vet

10

RHINOCEROS

‘I wish that people would realize that animals are totally dependent on us, helpless, like children, a trust that is put upon all of us.’

James Herriot

I shuddered as I gazed at the item in my hand: a coarse, disagreeable material, with an unpleasant odour. The myriad of emotions was overwhelming: helplessness, disgust, bewilderment, confusion, and an anger that only a deep injustice can bring.

I turned the item over and over in my hand, studying its every facet; I felt the barbarity, suffering, cruelty and death of what had gone before. But at the same time the item created a glimmer of hope in the darkness, a sign that despite the depravity of human nature, there would always be a fight against it.

The item was maybe 6 inches long by 6 inches at its base, a dark grey almost black in colour, rough on all but one side and conical in shape. It might have resembled a large chunk of laval rock, but for the unique and distinctive smell. The smell was undeniably animal in origin, a noxious, stale, earthy dung recently infiltrated with the pernicious stench of burnt hair.

Moments before, Geoff had casually thrown the item to me as nonchalantly as if it were indeed worthless rock. But this was far from worthless, and it was not a rock of any kind. It was in fact one of most expensive commodities on the black market, more expensive than heroin or cocaine, and its illicit and illegal brutal trade was bringing a species to the brink of extinction.

I was holding about a kilogram of rhino horn, which at current valuations was worth about £65,000. Just minutes earlier, it had been the property of the large female white rhino that was lying metres from where I stood.

She was lying on her chest, her front and back feet tucked under her, her head swaying gently, inches from the ground, as she snorted in an anaesthetic stupor. A blindfold covered her eyes, and an old pair of tights stuffed with padding made convenient earplugs. A dozen people busied themselves around her, some monitoring her heart rate and breathing, others adjusting the intravenous catheter in her right ear which was connected to a 5-litre bag of saline being held above her head. The dart that delivered the Etorphine and Azaperone drug combination to induce anaesthesia had been removed, and the resulting wound had been injected with penicillin to prevent infection. Several of the farm workers were pouring large drums of water over her to prevent overheating in the sweltering African sun. Every procedure required serious manpower. Another group held taut a thick rope that looped around one of the rhino’s back legs – the full extent of African health and safety! We were in exposed bush, with no trees to climb or obstacles to hide behind. If the rhino suddenly awoke, the rope would give us the crucial momentary advantage we would need to retreat. Weighing close to 2 tonnes and reaching speeds of up to 40 mph, a rhino is not to be trifled with. We all knew that this ostensibly very organized, controlled, routine procedure could, in an instant, turn into a very dangerous life-threatening scenario. I had learned never to be complacent around animals, and never more so than when it was a wild animal of such immense strength and speed.

Geoff, the farm manager, had just finished removing the secondary horn with his Black & Decker cordless reciprocating saw. He threw the horn to one of his colleagues as he stood up, groaned, and stretched, rubbing his lower back. Dressed in his obscenely diminutive blue light cotton shorts, with the typical safari thick khaki cotton short-sleeve shirt and khaki ankle boots, he was in his mid-sixties. A true Afrikaaner farmer, he was rough and tough, but with a huge heart and a gentle soul. From a lifetime of working with wildlife he had become hardened to most things, but the horrific reality of being on the front line of rhino poaching was taking its toll. Every morning when he went out on his daily check of the 200-hectare game farm, he feared what he might find. I had only ever seen pictures before and that was shocking enough. To actually find the mutilated body of an animal that you had known from a calf, had watched grow, then produce a calf of its own which it nurtured and raised, I could not begin to imagine. On top of that, to know how much it must have suffered before it died would make you physically sick. Geoff said it often did.

The reason for our presence there that day, and for our involvement in the risky anaesthesia of a healthy animal, was as part of a dehorning programme, designed to prevent the rhinos on the farm being poached. The hope was that if the horn were removed back to its germinal base, the remaining horn tissue would be of insufficient size to be worth poaching. The dehorning of rhinos was stringently controlled. A rhino owner needed to apply for a specific licence from the Parks Board to allow them to dehorn an animal. Once granted, the procedure required the attendance of a State Vet to supervise and document the operation. Delaray was the State Vet today, a tall, slender, youthful chap. It was his first job out of vet school, and as such it could have been a very tough first gig, having to lay down the law with some of these toughened farmers. But he was a warm, friendly, likeable chap and it was immediately apparent on first meeting the group that day that Geoff and the senior farmhands had an immense respect and affection for him.

As Geoff finished the dehorning procedure, Delaray and a couple of vet students busied themselves around the rhino’s head, variously taking blood from an ear vein, collecting hair and toenail samples, gathering up any remnant fragments of horn, and tagging and photographing the rhino. It was all part of the DNA identification record that allowed each and every horn to be traced to the farm, with details of the animal, and the date and time that it had been removed. With the horn being so incredibly valuable, the paper trail had to be impeccable to prevent even a sniff of corruption or any horns inexplicably ‘disappearing’. Even so, and despite every effort to the contrary, corruption was still heartbreakingly rife. With its value of £65,000, each kilogram of horn was worth more than most Africans would earn in a lifetime. This was often just too tempting to resist. I remembered a conversation I had had two years previously with a ranger at Chobe National Park in Botswana, when we were out on a morning game drive. It was my first trip to Africa and I was intent on learning more about the poaching problem. He told me that just a few months previously the park had lost its last black rhino to poaching, an utter devastation for all who had fought, quite literally, to prevent such a scenario. But to add insult to injury, when they located the horn using the tracker that it had been implanted with, it was under the bed of one of the park security guards. ‘You can’t trust anyone in this game,’ he had said.

Geoff stepped back from the rhino, his task now done for this one, but we were only just getting started. With nine more to go, it was going to be a long day. He glanced over at me; I was still holding the horn he had thrown to me. As he caught my eye, he read my thoughts.

‘You are wondering how anyone could mutilate such a beautiful animal for something similar to our fingernails? Or something like that?’

‘Something like that,’ I acknowledged. ‘This must taste disgusting, and you’ve got to be pretty stupid to think it has any medicinal properties. I just don’t get it.’

‘It is desperation and three thousand years of tradition tied up in one. It’s impossible to counter, and they don’t have a clue about the brutality involved in obtaining it. Then at this end, the guys doing the dirty work are on the breadline, struggling to feed themselves and their families. Someone comes along and offers them more money than they will ever otherwise see, for some information or one night of work. It’s no wonder they jump at it. We can condemn them, gasping in disgust and shuddering in disbelief that a fellow human could be so callous and brutal, while we lie in our comfortable beds, watch TV in our cosy homes, and shop in food halls stacked with every food choice known to man. We don’t know the desperation of wondering where the next meal will come from. For them the choice is simple, it’s “the animal or me”. For every poacher killed, there are a hundred more lining up to take his place.’

It was a perspective I hadn’t considered before. It was humbling, in a way, given what he had seen and experienced. Suddenly the problem was opening up to me in a way I hadn’t understood before. I felt ashamed as a foreigner to be coming in with all my preconceptions and prejudices, ignorant of the nuances of the problem. It was an abhorrent illegal trade that was bringing a species to the brink of extinction, there was no question about it, but there was also never going to be a simple solution. There were so many layers to the problem and I was only just starting to understand them.

‘It’s the depraved, malicious, pitiless, bloodthirsty, inhuman gang leaders that run the cartels that I want to get. String ’em up by their balls and let’s see how they like being slashed around and shot at before having a chunk hacked out of their face.’ The emotion was raw and the words just splurged out. It wasn’t pleasant to hear, but I felt the same visceral emotion – and I hadn’t even confronted the reality in the flesh.

Three years later I was back in South Africa. The morning had begun rather sedately with a relaxing breakfast; there was no tight schedule, nothing much on the agenda for the morning. We were a mixed group of seven vets from America, the UK and South Africa. It was to be a morning of sharing research, experiences and knowledge. Half an hour in, though, it all changed. Derik received the phone call he always knew might come, but had hoped never would.

Sabi, the three-year-old white rhino that he and Cobus had rescued and nursed back to health after it had been shot while his mother was poached, had himself been poached in the night.

Sabi had been just weeks old when rangers had found him trying to nuzzle the mutilated body of his mother. He was in a bad way, having been shot three times. But despite the poachers’ efforts to kill or scare him off, he had remained by his mother’s side as she had been peppered with machine-gun bullets and slashed across her back and legs with machetes. She then had her horn hacked off before being left to die in utter agony.

At just weeks old he was completely helpless, so when Cobus arrived on the scene he knew Sabi’s only chance of survival was 24/7 care. They took him back to the vets’ base and nurtured him back to health, feeding him every few hours and often sleeping with him to keep him company. Incredibly, and against the odds, he made a full recovery and grew well.

At six months of age he was sufficiently independent that they felt it best to relocate him to a secure facility where he could be socialized with other rhinos. It was here, two and a half years later, that Sabi once again had to experience the callous, depraved brutality of human greed, and this time it cost him his life.

As Derik hung up the phone, his shock and disbelief were evident; he struggled to find the words as he fought back the tears. He had experienced the realities of rhino poaching countless times, but this had a personal element to it. He reached into his top pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and turned to walk out of the room as he fumbled in his pocket for his lighter. The atmosphere in the room, which only moments before had been light-hearted, full of jokes and laughter, was now an eerie silence. We exchanged glances, but none of us could speak for shock, and anyway, there didn’t seem to be anything to say. We heard Derik’s phone ring again from the veranda outside the meeting room and then the distinctive guttural sounds of Afrikaans. The smell of cigarette smoke now permeated the room. We remained in silence, each immersed in our own thoughts. When the phone call had ended and the cigarette extinguished, Derik rejoined us.

‘They want us to go and help with the post-mortem,’ he announced. ‘The police and forensics need to examine the scene and gather evidence initially, and then it will be over to us. I warn you, it won’t be pleasant, but this is reality. We’ll leave in half an hour.’

The journey was a bizarre experience. Large portions of it were conducted in silence, each of us lost in our own thoughts as we gazed out the window at the passing African landscape. Conversation, when it did come, ranged from trivial small talk to an emotive discussion about how to deter poachers, protect rhinos and whether legalizing the trade in rhino horn was the solution or whether we were just being naive and the battle was already lost.

Three years before, I had been convinced that legalizing the trade of rhino horns was the answer. Allowing people to farm them like any other animal product would flood the market, reduce the price, and thus reduce the incentive to poach them. It seemed a painfully simple solution to a dire problem. If asked, I would have invoked the regulations implemented by CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) in the 1970s that promoted crocodile farming – a system of captive breeding that sought to prevent crocodile ranching and the theft of eggs from the wild, and how this brought the Nile crocodile back from the brink of extinction. If it worked for crocodiles, wouldn’t it work for rhinos, too? As is often the way, though, the more ignorant you are, the simpler the solution can appear to be.

Unfortunately, the solution to these problems is invariably multifactorial. They involve predicting an outcome that will only be able to be proven after it has been committed to and is impossible to undo. Get it wrong, and you are faced with a new problem, which may be worse, perhaps catastrophically so, than the first.

So is legalizing the trade of rhino horn the answer? Three years on, I was more sceptical. In 2001, three rhinos were poached in the whole of South Africa, in 2016 nearly three rhinos were being poached every day, an unsustainable increase that will see the species extinct in twenty-five years if something dramatic isn’t done to stop it. So what has led to this exponential increase? For hundreds of years the horn of this exotic creature from lands far away has been believed to possess medicinal properties, ranging from curing rheumatism, gout and typhoid, to snakebites, food poisoning and even cancer. With the increase of wealth in Asia, more and more people purchase rhino horn as a status symbol, simply to show that they can, and thus the demand has increased dramatically. The current annual global demand for rhino horn is estimated at around 16 million tonnes, and it is thought that there are around 40 million tonnes stockpiled in vaults from animals that have been legally dehorned for their protection. If the trade were legalized, this stockpile could be used to supply the market and thus reduce the poaching demand. But there are two possible fallouts from this. Poaching would indeed be reduced as this stockpile replaced it, but it would be used up more quickly than it could be replenished. The current stockpile has taken fifteen years to accumulate, and once used, at present levels of demand, poaching would return to the same level as before. Alternatively, poaching levels might remain high as legal horn hit the market, the sale price of it would then fall, making it affordable to a wider population, thus increasing the demand from 16 million tonnes a year to maybe 20 million or even more. It takes about eighteen months for 1 kilogram of horn to grow on an adult rhino, and it is estimated that there are 29,000 rhinos left in the wild, so the current demand is impossible to match sustainably with these numbers. Two things need to be achieved: the current demand needs to decrease, and the birth rate of rhino calves needs to exceed the rate at which they are being killed.

Legalizing the trade of rhino horn may be one component of the answer, but education and awareness have to penetrate the heart of these communities too.

When we arrived at the farm, we parked some distance from the bomas (enclosures) where the rhinos were kept at night. Lisa, who ran the sanctuary, greeted us. She had obviously been crying, and composed herself as she politely met us, but as soon as she made eye contact with Derik the tears started flowing again. There was a deep, raw, emotional grief shared between the two of them, almost like that of bereaved parents. As they hugged, the grief turned to anger as Lisa exploded in a burst of Afrikaans that we didn’t need translating to comprehend. Lisa had been heading up this secure, highly confidential sanctuary for nearly ten years. The sanctuary served two purposes: as a safe house that rhinos could be moved to when a reserve was hit by poaching, and as a place that rehabilitated and cared for rhinos that had suffered injury from poaching. The work Lisa and her team did was invaluable in the fight against the seemingly unstoppable force of the poaching cartels. But all of this was now severely threatened. The tragedy of Sabi was utterly devastating for all those involved, but the wider implications for the sanctuary were completely shattering; every remaining rhino was at extreme risk of a similar fate, and it was now a race against time to come up with a strategy to protect them.

The police and forensic teams were already at work combing the area for clues. We could see them in the distance: it was going to take some time to complete their task and until then we had to keep well clear for fear of contaminating the crime scene. Our attention was quickly drawn to an enclosure close to the house, containing two rhino calves that couldn’t have been more than a few months old. Like magnets, we were irresistably drawn to them. Having regained her composure and assuming the role of hostess, Lisa followed us.

‘These are Sethemba and Isibindi. Their names mean “hope” and “courage” in Zulu. Both of their mothers were killed by poachers. Sethemba had her ears hacked off in the process and Isibindi had several deep wounds to her head and side caused by machetes. It’s a common occurrence. The poachers view these young calves as a nuisance, so they try to scare them off and attack them wildly. Sometimes they kill them, but more often they are just severely maimed.’ She paused for a moment, collecting her thoughts. ‘So strong is the mother–calf bond that despite the extreme trauma they suffer, they are always found together in the morning. Often it is apparent that the mother has used every last ounce of her strength to protect her offspring, dragging her mutilated body through the bush to where her calf has retreated to shelter. The mothers rarely survive the night due to the extent of their injuries, so in the morning the calves are usually found nuzzling their mother’s head, crying for her to get up and confused about why she hasn’t. I don’t think there can be a more distressing sight in all of nature than a baby mourning its mother. Their high-pitched squeak or whine cuts right through you. You’d have to be inhuman not to weep.’

As we surveyed the two little rhinos, seemingly happy and content charging around, playing with each other, oblivious to our watching eyes, it was hard to comprehend the suffering that they had already endured in their short lives. What more did they have to face? How would the situation play out for their species? Their generation exists at a critical time: will they see their extinction averted or will they both just become two more gruesome poaching statistics as the species is eradicated by human greed?

A further two hours passed before the forensic team had finished their work. The senior police officer strode over to Lisa’s house where we had been waiting. He engaged Lisa and Derik in a long conversation in Afrikaans, obviously explaining the team’s findings. Although we were unable to understand the details, their expressions gave us a stark insight into what they were hearing. It was as if they were hearing the last movements of a gallant son killed in action. Grief, anger, despair and guilt were all there on their faces.

We later learned the full story of what had happened. There had been a full moon. Poaching goes up threefold on a full moon because of the increased visibility. There had been two perpetrators, and all the evidence indicated that they were very familiar with the set-up at the enclosures and with Sabi himself. The tracks led directly to Sabi’s enclosure. They had known exactly which animal they were going for and where he would be. It had been an inside job. Geoff’s words echoed in my head from three years before: ‘You can’t trust anyone in this game.’ Standing at the inside feeding hatch, they had lured Sabi into his shelter with food, and then shot him twice in the head at point-blank range. However, these first shots didn’t kill him, and instead he turned in fright to flee. The poachers then shot him three more times: the first in the top of his neck, the second across his mid-spine, and the third into the side of his head. He had managed to stumble 10 feet out of his shelter before he had finally collapsed and died.

It was in a sombre and apprehensive mood that we made our way to the enclosure, trying to picture in our minds the scene that would greet us, so that we could mentally prepare ourselves. Nothing could prepare us for it, though.

We walked into the boma from the end furthest from the shelter. Several members of the police and forensic teams were still gathered around Sabi, obscuring most of his body, so all we could initially see were his hindquarters. From that angle he could have just been another anaesthetized rhino. Moving round the enclosure, we could see glimpses of bright red contrasted against his dark grey skin. But it was when the party gathered around Sabi noticed our arrival and turned to greet us that we saw the full extent of the horror. The front of his head had been hacked off, from below his eyes to above his nose. Where his nose and two horns should have been was now just a mess of bone, blood and tissue. Congealed blood covered the sides of what remained of his face. There was one solitary marker protruding from a bullet wound on the side of his head, from which a trickle of blood had run. The marker indicated the fatal shot. An additional and unexpected cause of revulsion was the exposed mess of bony flesh where the right foot should have been. We found out later that because of an increasing trade in fake rhino horn, it was now commonplace for the poachers to hack off a leg as well, as evidence that the horn had indeed come from a rhino.

As the scene before us began to sink in, there were no words. It was a bizarre juxtaposition: Sabi seemed so peaceful lying there, and yet the starkness of his mutilations told of the suffering he had endured and the depravity and greed of mankind. The farm workers, Derik, and the rest of the team, started on the post-mortem under the supervision of the police. To our great relief we were not required. We sat down on the dry, dusty dirt of the enclosure, a few metres from where Sabi’s body was slowly losing its majestic identity in a procedure familiar to all of us. No words were exchanged. Once again, we were each of us lost in our thoughts, processing and trying to come to terms with it all. As a group of six vets, we had all seen hundreds of dead animals, witnessed hideous injuries and experienced desperate sadness in our careers to date, but this was different: a deliberate, targeted, malign and murderous cruelty, driven by grotesque human avarice, and meted out on an innocent and beautiful animal.

We were just about holding it together, each of us masking our anguish with a feeling of outrage. Or at least we were – until we started hearing a high-pitched, mewing cry. At first we were clueless as to its origin or significance. It was a rather irritating, uncomfortable sound, but as it persisted, it dawned on us that this was the distressed rhino cry to which Lisa had earlier alluded. Peering between the wooden posts separating the two enclosures, we could just make out the rhino next door. He was repeatedly, obsessively, pacing up and down against the fence, crying out unremittingly in an impassioned whimper. We will never know exactly what those cries signified, those visceral, emotive, childlike cries. And though it is always dangerous to anthropomorphize, it was impossible not to hear these cries as heartfelt and agonizing – cries of confusion, cries of grief, cries of concern. Why was his friend not responding? Why was there so much human activity around him? Why was there that distinctive smell of blood that he could only recognize intrinsically as danger, a sense that all was not right?

For us, though, to hear such a pathetic and feeble noise emanating from such an immensely large and powerful creature was the last straw. It was as though he were begging us, on behalf of all rhinos, to do something. Turning away, I was glad of the sunglasses masking my eyes. There was no holding back the tears anymore.

Rhinos: fast facts

Ceratotherium simum: The white rhinoceros

Distribution: There are five distinct species of rhinoceros, two native to Africa and three to Southern Asia. 98.5 per cent of white rhinos live in just five countries (South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Uganda).

Names: An adult male is called a ‘bull’, a female a ‘cow’, and the young a ‘calf’. A group of rhinoceroses is called a ‘crash’.

Life span: About 40–50 years.

Habitat: Mainly open, grassy plains, though other species prefer swamps or forested areas.

Diet: The white rhino is a grazer, and is distinguished from the black rhino, which is a browser, by its wide flat upper lip, which allows it to pull up even short grasses.

Gestation: 16–18 months.

Weight: Newborn calves weigh 40–65 kg, reaching an adult weight of between 1,700 kg (females) and 2,300 kg (males).

Growth: Females tend to live in crashes of up to 14 animals; males are usually solitary, but will stay with a female for up to 20 days at mating. The female raises a solitary calf, only giving birth every 3 to 5 years. The calf will stay with the mother until about 3 years. Females reach sexual maturity at about 5 years, while males reach sexual maturity at about 7 years.

Body temperature: 36.6–37.2 °C.

Interesting fact: Contrary to popular belief, the name ‘white rhino’ doesn’t refer to its colour, but comes from a mistranslation of the Dutch word ‘wijd’, meaning ‘wide’, referring to the width of its mouth which distinguishes it from the narrow pointed mouth of the black rhino.

Conservation: Of the five species of rhinoceros the IUCN identifies the black, Javan and Sumatran as ‘critically endangered’, the Indian as ‘vulnerable’ and the white as ‘near threatened’. The statistics surrounding rhinos are horrifying: only about 275 Sumatran rhinos and a mere 60 Javan rhinos remain in the wild; between the 1960s and 1990s black rhino populations fell from 70,000 to 2,410, and the Indian rhino to about 1,870. In 2007 13 rhinos were poached in the whole of South Africa; in 2014 the number reached 1,215, which equates to more than 3 a day. So although there are estimated to be around 20,000 white rhinos in the wild, and about 4,500 black rhinos, at current poaching rates rhinos will be extinct from Africa within 25 years. What is more, the manner in which these animals are brutally slaughtered leaves them to suffer and die in agony. Saving the Survivors is an incredible charity whose focus is on the treatment and care of all wildlife, but particularly rhinos that have fallen victim to poaching or traumatic incidents. See www.savingthesurvivors.org.